Vestiges of affect: A photographic re-calling of a forced migrant community’s landscapes

This research explores the role the photographic imagination can play in communicating a sense of loss and trauma of forced migration. It is a practice-led landscape photography research project, a re-visiting of the flight towards the end of WW2 from a small village, Gardyny, the home of my father, to Hemme, Heide- Holstein. Is it possible for landscape photography to recall a shared, familiar cultural memory of home, and what impact do trauma and time have on this memory? Are such memories recalled, re-constructed or re-imagined, and how can the taking, editing and presentation of photographs enable this? In what ways can photography communicate intimacy with such fragmented landscapes? Can the expressed empathy be contained in the photography however fleeting and threatened by distance, both geographically and through time? The approach draws on archival research, oral histories and auto-ethnographic photographic field work which includes phenomenological methods. It analyses lived personal experience across generations and reframes them within their current social and political context. Methods combine landscape photography with discursive writing, thereby responding to archive materials, literature and personal memories expressed in interviews conducted. Outcomes are presented in a thesis alongside a digital photographic book.