Edwards, Jake (2021) Unidentified flying objects, photographic aesthetics, and moving images. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

Images of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) are the site of an acute crisis in photographic representation. The purportedly “authentic” UFO photographs that proliferated in the mid twentieth century are alleged to depict some unknown aerial activity operating just beyond the perimeter of scientific knowledge, yet courtesy of the visual ambiguities that maintain the UFO’s essential unidentifiability, they typically reveal almost nothing of its actual nature. Despite these visual ambiguities, UFOs also quickly established themselves as an iconographical staple of popular entertainment cinema. Between their appearances in these two very different kinds of photographic image, photographic UFOs emblematise many of the key issues at stake in debates concerning the epistemology of photographic imaging. What is it we actually see in photographic images, and what can we hope to reliably learn from them? Why do some photographs seem innately comprehensible, perhaps even overburdened with association, while others seem to resist attempts towards their interpretation? Juxtaposing a range of competing approaches to photographic semiology from film and photography theory (including the modernist realism of Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film, and C. S. Peirce’s conceptualisation of “symbolic,” “iconic,” and “indexical” signs), this thesis performs a theoretical examination of the unique aesthetic character of the photographic UFO, and what it is capable of revealing about the nature of the photographic image. Using close textual analysis of both still and moving, fictional and non-fictional UFO images, it is a consideration of how the UFO’s self-reflexive semiotic unruliness functions variously favourably and unfavourably in the context of both art and evidence. Culminating with the formulation of a speculative theory of the photographic UFO’s visual disruption, this thesis presents the UFO as an image that gestures to a range of representational possibilities beyond what are conventionally considered the limits of photographic representation and interpretation.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN1993 Motion Pictures T Technology > TL Motor vehicles. Aeronautics. Astronautics T Technology > TR Photography
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Unidentified flying objects, Unidentified flying objects in motion pictures, Photography of unidentified flying objects
Official Date:	July 2021
Dates:	Date Event July 2021 UNSPECIFIED
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of Film and Television Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Pigott, Michael ; Schoonover, Karl
Sponsors:	University of Warwick. Centre for Arts Doctoral Research Excellence
Format of File:	pdf
Extent:	324 leaves : illustrations
Language:	eng

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