The Aesthetics of Photographic Production

The Aesthetics of Photographic Production is a media-rich Research Catalogue exposition emerging from an AHRC-funded long-term practice research project (2018–24) that investigates photographic production as a multisensory, material, and more-than-human field of making. The project’s dissemination strategy is threefold: this exposition, a published monograph (Jaeger 2025), and the performance and exhibition of artworks, each calibrated to communicate the research through distinct epistemic affordances. Grounded in sensory field encounters within commercial laboratories and manufacturing facilities — Bayeux London, Make it Easy Lab Nottingham, Fujifilm Tilburg, and Polaroid Enschede — the exposition foregrounds production ecologies where photographic work emerges through distributed relations among technicians, machines, paper, chemistry, protocols, speed, and darkness.

The exposition is organised by two objectives: to examine what else besides the photograph is aesthetically made in photographic production, and to explore the implications of this shift for the concept of photographic practice (Jaeger 2025). These aims are pursued through four subpages — tensioning, tearing, fogging, and fieldwork — which assemble visual, sonic, and audiovisual materials to render process insights encounterable. Rather than privileging the finished image, the exposition attends to practices of calibration, residue, and non-image making, where touch, listening, rhythm, and material agency become central to photographic knowledge and to expanded understandings of photographic practice.