Phenomenological Approach to Bodily Experiences: Camera Operating as Skilled Practice

Date

2023-6

Author

Gürtekin, Fatıma Betül

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This thesis investigates the nature of camera operating practice in multicamera systems from camera operators’ perspectives. To do this, this study consults phenomenology and postphenomenology as theoretical stances. With phenomenological approach, this thesis examines camera operating practice as a technique of the body and accordingly skilled practice which involves skill and expertise. In this regard, this thesis conducts two staged field study which are autoethnography and ethnography. Autoethnography helps me to collect my instantaneous camera operating experiences with my interpretations, opinions, and feelings. This stage is followed by the ethnographic study involving semi-structured in-depth interviews, participant observations and post-observation interviews. Ethnographic study helps me to gather my colleagues’ narrations on camera operating practice and their lived bodily experiences of camera operating. According to the field studies, camera operating practice from phenomenological perspective unfolds in embodiment layers which are embodiment in the system, embodiment with the equipment, and embodiment with the picture. These inter-related and inter-dependent embodiment layers are exposed to be interrupted. In case of interruptions, the camera person looks for regaining the embodiment. Both in sustaining and in re-gaining the embodiment process, camera operator employes her skilled practice to generate the intended picture and to immerse herself into the flow experience. As an embodied flow experience, camera operating passes beyond singular manipulation of a product and gains a complex nature. In this regard, complex camera operating is also skilled, co-generative, collective and situated, sociocultural and sociopolitical, and mediated. As presenting this extraordinary nature of the camera operating practice, this thesis proposes a complex operating model and promises implications for theory, methodology and design practice.

Subject Keywords

Phenomenology, Embodiment, Camera Operating

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/104511

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis