Researcher ORCID Identifier

0009-0002-5542-0961

Graduation Year

2025

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Media Studies

Reader 1

Elizabeth Affuso

Reader 2

Carlin Wing

Rights Information

© 2025 Ella G Bailey

Abstract

Abstract

The practice of photography, throughout its evolution over the past 203 years, has ebbed and flowed but ultimately rests in a steady state of documentary and archival impulse. In the context of disability studies and subsequent examinations of embodiment, we may observe this evolution and fluctuation as a means for documenting expression, embodiment, and representation within the photographic medium. In such observation, there appears a noticeable gap in theoretical inquiry of the relationship between an evolving photographic practice and representations of invisible disability and chronic mental/physical illness. This thesis examines analog self-portraiture as a recently-alternative mode of expression and a means of exploring complex notions of embodiment through non-normative processes. With a focus on 21st-century practitioners Aurora Berger (United States) and Nelly Ating (Nigeria and the United Kingdom), the analysis develops an understanding of alternative photographic processes as conduits for unconventional physical manifestation.

These case studies inform a developing necessity for alternative photographic practice as an effective and rounded mode of embodiment and expression in largely invisible medical conditions. A well-rounded pursuit of embodiment therefore behooves non-digital, often experimental photographic expression in a void of facile visual representation. Section one of the following analysis examines the spectrum linked with such alternative processes, section two provides a synthesis of means of embodiment through analog creation, and section three outlines the intricacies of self-archivization central to illness–and–disability–(in)formed experience.

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This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.

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