Weird realism as a form of speculative photography and fiction
Dodd, Ryan (2026) Weird realism as a form of speculative photography and fiction. PhD thesis, University for the Creative Arts.
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This practice-based research focuses on weird literary fiction, and critical photographic practice in order to develop a new form of weird realism by using transdisciplinary practice, combining
documentary photography, collage, and speculative fiction into a photo novel. This study builds upon the methodologies of key critical photographic practitioners, Allan Sekula, W.G. Sebald, Laura Ford and Teju Cole, to address the lack of research around the weird in photographic theory and practice. The urgency of addressing this gap in research, arises from the recent upsurge of fascism which has formed as reaction to a capitalist crisis of productive forces. Social progress is hindered by private ownership of the means of production, causing mass inequality.
This move towards fascism is grounded in the idea that an alternative to capitalism is impossible. The importance of the weird therefore, comes from its intense affectivity, in contrast to the flattened affect of the present. The weird has the capability to make another world seem possible.
My process is based on a literary analysis of H. P. Lovecraft’s weird fictions, Polaris (1918), The Whisper in Darkness (1931), At the Mountains of Madness (1936), The Shadow Out of Time (1936) and The Shadow over Innsmouth (1936). My analysis also focuses on J. G. Ballard’s weird fictions, Concrete Island (1974) and Millennium People (2003). These literary texts are examined alongside case studies of photographic realisms, to determine how the weird can operate in photography through the index. Also how the weird can be evoked by the use of and interplay between analogue and digital photographic forms, together with speculative fiction. Before turning to creative strategies of negation and resistance, in order to address the gap in research between photography, weird fiction and cultural criticism. My process for making photographic work is based on the methods of montage, taken from Allan Sekula’s critical realism in Fish Story (1995). Laura Ford’s employment of détournement through xerox and collage in the punk zine Savage Messiah (2019). W.G Sebald’s use of metaphor to combine image and text, in The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Teju Cole’s use of the documentary photobook as a speculative site in order to imagine a different world Fernweh (2020).
My final output, Sunspots Through a Blackened Windscreen (2025), is a photo novel and moving image video. It is comprised of my original speculative fiction, together with photographs and
3 collages from the real world location of Portsmouth, England, plus collages made using estate agent advertisements and New Labour’s 2024 election campaign materials. My original fiction is about a dystopic possible future under neoliberal capitalism set in the fictional place of “Port City”. It deploys the weird through dreams, different unfoldings of temporality, and anthropomorphism. The photographs and collages are linked to the text through metaphor, to communicate the weird in order
to make another world feel possible at a time of rising global fascism.
Thesis submitted in partial requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham.
Supervisor: Francis Summers.
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