Theory of R: reconceptualising artistic failure into transformative dialectics of Trauma

Abstract

This article presents a practice-based autoethnographic inquiry into Theory of R (2011–2019), an eight-year documentary photography project initially conceived as a sociopolitical investigation of post-2008 urbanism in Riga, Latvia. Through sustained self-reflexive analysis, I trace how the project’s persistent incompleteness, snapshot aesthetic, and compulsive returns to the same urban locations were driven not solely by documentary intent but also by an unprocessed late-term pregnancy loss that remained unspoken for nearly a decade. Drawing on Caruth’s traumatic return, Butler’s grievability, Foster’s traumatic realism, and Barthes’s phenomenology of the photographic image, I argue that the project’s apparent artistic failure constitutes a transformative dialectic through which personal trauma and sociopolitical critique become mutually constitutive. The article advances four contributions: it demonstrates that photographic practice can operate as displaced grief work without the maker’s conscious awareness; it illustrates how tacit knowledge generated through extended creative practice can resist explicit articulation for years; it proposes that repetition compulsion within a sustained creative framework can function as a mode of practice-based knowledge production; and it theorizes how a photographer’s unresolved vulnerability can generate ethical proximity to marginalized subjects that differs from both detached observation and performative empathy.