Kerry McCarthy
Living in the ice (im)age: theorising photography at the margins of Antarctic exploration
Kerry McCarthy, Gateway Antarctica & Canterbury Museum
Supervisors
Bryan Storey, Gateway Antarctica
Jacky Bowring, Lincoln University
Mike Pearson, University of Aberystwyth , Wales
This thesis project will draw on photography theory, particularly the work of two seminal writers, Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes, and will link this with the rhetorical and motivational analyses of Kenneth Burke, in order to consider how photographs function to create, reinforce and potentially to destabilise the ideologies that underlie the taken for granted.
It will take account of the photograph both as an image and as an enduring object, and will focus on the Antarctic photography collection at Canterbury Museum, in particular its rich resource of snapshots from the ‘heroic era', with the intention of adding to the understanding of how photographs operate in this context, as well as providing new insights into the experience of Antarctic exploration, particularly for some of the players overlooked in the traditional narratives.