Postgraduate Students

Emily Goldthorpe

Across Time: Shaping the Landscape of Central Otago through the Lens

My thesis will examine the landscape of Central Otago as photograph, focusing in particular on scenes of mining and landscapes that have been altered by human intervention. While these photographs are dominated by nature they are by no means empty of the human. I aim to examine how the area has been photographed over time, from 1865 to the contemporary, looking at the relationship between man and the environment. I will use a select group of photographers to illustrate how the landscape has been photographed and by doing so explore changing attitudes to landscape and photography, and how these attitudes have influenced the production of particular landscape photographs. My thesis will take the form of a chronotope, looking at how a particular space is represented over time. In this narrative it is not only how the space is represented that changes, but our perception of the landscape as it is shaped by these photographs.

Supervisors: Dr. Erika Wolf and Dr. Judith Bennett