The Art of Experimentation Symposium

Join me at The Art of Experimentation Symposium on 1st August in Bristol organised by Folk House Darkroom and Women Alternative Photography Group. Tickets are on sale now here. I will be reading my paper Seeing Through Her: Translucency and Boundaries in Cameraless Photography which talks about feminist philosophy, photographic medium and the flesh. I will be talking about my works Ala i Ola (2026) and Fading (2025), pictured below during a recent installation.

Seeing Through Her: Translucency and Boundaries in Cameraless Photography

Feminist philosophy has long been concerned with the visibility of women's bodies and the boundaries that define them. In her reading of Aristotle, feminist scholar Luce Irigaray frames women's subjugation through a stark dichotomy: men's bodies are opaque, legible, bounded; women's are invisible, breached without being noticed. But what happens to this framework when it encounters a medium that troubles the very distinction between visibility and invisibility?

This paper turns to cameraless photography, and specifically to the photogram, as both a practical and philosophical site for rethinking gendered boundaries. Grounded in my own experimental practice in black-and-white and colour darkrooms, it introduces the concept of translucency. Here, a body is neither fully visible nor invisible, neither opaque nor transparent, and its boundaries are not erased but complicated and tested at their very edges. Translucency is a concept that sits outside what Irigaray's binary can hold — one that could not have been arrived at through theory alone but only through the material encounter between bodies, light, and photosensitive surfaces.

It is through the experimentation with the materials that old philosophical assumptions can be tested and meet their limits. Through reframing invisibility and proposing translucency as a feminist method, this paper opens new grounds for thinking about bodies through cameraless photography.