This arts-based educational research dissertation is grounded in my emergent practices of photography and understandings about its material medium of photobook through visual reading and small book making. With the four chapters and one separate and accompanying handmade photobook titled Missing Mountain, I seek to trace, sort out, articulate, and make sense of my own experiential processes of engaging with photography as a photographer-in-becoming, a very beginning photobook maker, and as a humanities-oriented educational researcher. In the first chapter, I present photographic inquiry as an arts-based methodology by drawing related important literature to conceptualize how photography could be an aesthetic inquiry process in relation to actuality/reality and its specific medium of photobook as another way of affective telling/presentation. In the second chapter, given inspirations from John Dewey's ideas on art and experience and Elliot Eisner's ideas on what and how art teaches, I describe my experiential processes of photo-taking, photobook making, and changing modes of photographic practices in my everyday life over one and a half years as an arts-based educational research. In the third chapter, inspired by Michel Foucault and Lynn Fendler's sense of ethics as work around the self, I examine in four elaborated themes how this whole photographic inquiry project is also process of creating a subject as work of art. My fourth and last chapter is an elaborated and detailed discussion and examination on what and how practices of arriving at my final photobook Missing Mountain has taught me in terms of learning to attend instead of to intend, as well as a poetic and esthetic mode of experiencing the surrounding everyday life.
Read
