Welcome to the online repository of Leanne Bell Gonczarow’s photographic art and research practice which foregrounds the interplay of light and matter on a variety of scales through the production of images, installations, videos and texts.

Light has agency. It can carve a line through a room to reveal the dance of dust particles. As Roland Barthes knew well, it can reach out through time to puncture our hearts, by the tender way it illuminates a loved ones skin in an old photograph. It makes oceans sparkle, it makes the moon shine – and in the wonder of these moments, light reveals itself as something tangible, something transformative. Light can also be unforgiving – it glares, blinds, burns. Over-exposure to light is causing the oceans to heat-up. This is not lights fault. White ice reflects light back out to space, but as human-induced climate change accelerates and the amount of ice on earth’s surface is rapidly depleting, more light is being absorbed by the land and sea, causing it to emit more heat. This contributes directly to global warming.

Camera-based photography – when considered as a light-capturing and transforming process – is by its nature materially and philosophically entangled with the processes of photonic reflection and absorption affecting the rising temperature of the earth’s land and sea. Photography can traditionally be understood as a collaboration between human, light and the social and technological (analogue or digital) apparatus. My ongoing practice-based PhD project considers how this collaboration can be expanded to position photography not only as a representational tool to document the landscape in crisis, but performatively – foregrounding questions of its ontology, materiality and agency. You can find out more about the project here.