Words leaking from objects: thinking with absent photographs

The possibilities within notions of the object constitute a special area of interest in my research. As I have come to see it, the object is bounded by – and yet comes to alter- views of representation/re-presentation; it contributes towards academic thinking through its capacity for democratizing and bridging itself towards others – yet it has a history of failing in the exchange of everyday gestures with places seemingly remote from the academia. Although accused of resolution and impermeability, I admittedly cannot part with the word ‘object’. And this creates a tension in my work with photography, where I attempt to articulate a personal view of the photograph as something ultimately unfixed. In this view, writing and photography extend continuously and reciprocally into the virtual and the physical from gestures before the photograph and before the word. This text reflects on these tensions, drawing on notions of affect, potentiality and on ethics to discover traces of the other suggested in the physical, but also the imaginary surface of an object. Following Sherry Turkle’s notion of ‘object’ as evocative, in this text ‘the things I think with’ form narratives that reflect the absence of other(s), and the escaping capacity of absent objects in and out of words.