More-than-Human Photography

Andrea Jaeger’s research offers new insights into photographic aesthetics and processes through focussing on materiality and on the personal or industrial tactile procedures and experiences implicated in the making of imagery.

— Liz Wells, writer and curator, Professor Emeritus in Photographic Culture, University of Plymouth.

This rich and illuminating book starts with the smell and sound of the photographic developing lab. This sets the scene for this detailed and highly original field-based study of the affective, sensory, embodied, procedural, aesthetic and industrial conditions from which photographs emerge. In this it takes photographs analytically beyond the human and beyond the representational into the realms of the deeply material and haptic.

— Elizabeth Edwards, Professor Emerita, Photographic History, De Montfort University.

Andrea Jaeger’s project provocatively makes the case for an expanded photographic practice which engages all the medium’s multisensory, material, and agential conditions of production. In its stress on analogue experience, Jaeger offers a refreshing antidote to digital abstractions, reminding us of the many creative possibilities involved in the physical act of making photographs.

— Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of History of Art, University of Oxford.

This book challenges the long-standing emphasis on the photographic image as the main object of analysis in photography studies. Instead, it shifts focus to the often-invisible processes behind the photograph—the tactile, sonic, and material interactions that unfold in darkrooms, commercial labs, and manufacturing sites. In doing so, it reconceptualises photographic practice as a multisensory, event-based process that extends well beyond the final image. Drawing on posthumanist and more-than-representational theories, the book explores how photography emerges through entanglements between human and nonhuman actors, tools, and environments. Through a rich combination of artistic research, sensory ethnography, and experimental aesthetics, it examines sites such as Bayeux London and the labs of Polaroid and Fujifilm to uncover the hidden infrastructures and embodied labour that shape photographic production. Filling a critical gap in photography scholarship, this study invites readers to rethink what it means to make a photograph. It offers vital insights for scholars and students in visual and photography studies, media and cultural theory, and artistic research, as well as for practitioners interested in experimental, material-driven approaches to image-making.

Andrea Jaeger is an award-winning multimedia artist based in Nottingham and Berlin who explores photography beyond representation, fostering connections between technologies, nature, and people, and engaging sensorial aesthetics, relational ethics, and visual thinking to embrace its intimate envelopment through touch, sight, and sound. Rooted in a posthumanist perspective, her work challenges the traditional view of photography as a fixed object of visual representation. Her experimental, collaborative, and feminist practice interrogates how concepts such as disruption, repetition, and violence ‘make sense’ in the making of images. Her art spans installations incorporating video, printed matter, and photographic paper, as well as participatory projects that invite audiences into processes of ‚making‘.