Perceiving Playful Photography

Abstract

This thesis looks at the practice of photography (and the perception of the photographer) through the lens (pun unintended) of game studies. In plain terms an example of such practices might be the playfulness in seeing a face on the moon, or animals in clouds. The scope of a master’s thesis requires a limited dataset, and as such the case is illustrated by analyzing existing photo material through game studies frameworks, especially Caillois, with autoethnographic methods. Photography affords the photographer a goal: to produce somehow meaningful imagery. This re-framing of the perceived is reminiscent of philosophical theories like sense datum theory and certain notions in the discipline of art studies, concerning art as a rhetorical practice. A camera might also be considered as a portable magic circle, or a portable Stevensian threshold, in the context of play in cities. The photographer looks through a viewfinder, and the size of objects can be irrelevant: consider the tower of Pisa being held up by a tourist. Actions of subjects can become play or ritualistic by framing. Distance can be rearranged, and separate props placed together using this portable threshold. This thesis briefly explores several frameworks and theories in an interdisciplinary literature section, then suggesting that the varied approaches to be found in Game Studies are not, in the author's opinion, any less applicable than many of the other frameworks or fields of study applied to it, and may indeed enhance the research into what is at play with photography