This chapter develops recent research which has focused on photography, time and place, drawing insight from discourse on the archaeology of the contemporary past (González-Ruibal, 2007; Harrison, 2013; Harrison and Breithoff, 2017; Pétursdóttir and Olsen, 2014). What interests me in particular is the way in which the archaeological transects time, and the affordances to thought which emerge when this is entangled with Karen Barad’s philosophy of spacetimemattering (2010, 261) and ‘cut’ (2010, 261) performatively through photographic practice. For Barad, one of the spectral encounters of the quantum field is the ‘ontological indeterminacy of time’ (2017, 68) which results in a ‘thickness of the here and now’ (Barad 2017, 73). This is a thick time, a queer time, in which different temporalities fold through one another. Reading this discourse diffractively though the landscape considered as a living archive gives rise to a way of reckoning with the material haunting(s) in, on and of the landscape.

I borrow from Barad’s articulation of the apparatus to argue that the flick of the shutter can be considered as an agential cut through which the photograph-as-writing is iterated as a dis/continuous material becoming of the world (Barad, 2010, 245). The rapid opening and closing of the shutter is a ‘cutting together apart’ (Barad, 2010, 245) of the material universe which constitutes the material-discursive practice of photography. Returning to re-think this in terms of photography in the expanded field of writing, that is, the syntax of photographic practice – repetition, elision, difference and delay – gives a writing that is haunted by time, not simply metaphorically, but sensibly and materially enacted in and through the practice of photography. The intra-actions of photography entail a material-discursive practice which enfolds the industrial complex of photography, its difficult history as a technique of observation and control; its function as a colonial apparatus; its photochemical nature and the racial bias inherent in this photochemical development (Lewis, 2019). These are the spectres of photography which problematise its certainties and challenge us to think deeply, yet speculatively about photographic images.

In this chapter for the Relate North publication I develop my inquiry which builds on a Baradian interpretation of photographic intra-action, and further, reimagines photography as ‘a transversal entity’ (Braidotti, 2013, 82) to explore the possibilities of ‘[t]hinking as the stuff of the world’ (Alaimo, 2014, 13) in relation to photographic practice. I propose this in order to conceive photography as a more-than human subject ‘a site traversed by strange agencies and immersed within entangled ethical and political relations.’ (Alaimo, 2018, 436) Furthermore, by mobilising Stacy Alaimo’s ‘trans-corporeality’ (2010), I think through photography as a practice which transects many bodies, human and non-human, animal, mineral and vegetal, and investigate this in relation to matters of care and the ethical imperatives of working in and with more than human worlds (Puig de le Bellacasa, 2017). I frame the text and accompanying photographs in the context of the fragile ecosystems of rural and northern landscapes, which has resonance for our Arctic neighbours.