This research is broadly concerned with the potential that representations connected to an a-priori event, image or object have for denaturalising their presumed signification. Questioning the popular understanding that a photograph is an image of something ‘that-has-been’, it proposes that while an image may provide various links to established meanings, this in itself does not confirm that something necessarily had any prior existence. Utilising photography as it is conventionally understood to capture, record, document a moment in time, something ‘that-has-been’, this study recognises meaning as chains of signification (Peirce) that simultaneously prefigure and forecast any text. It is proposing that every image has a before life and an afterlife which is both affirmed and contradicted; the representations created for this study exist in an immediacy of a reconstructed time and place that operates in the realm of signifiance; dislocating, tilting, skewing the presumed and previous links between sign and referent.

This study attempts to make transparent and yet further mythologise the ways representation is understood to convey the meaning of an experience, object or idea. It is providing opportunities for visual texts to speak of their reconstructed parts as readings determined in time and space contemporaneously to engagement with the reader/viewer.

Henceforth, 2009