
Real Body Integrated Media & Research Group
* Social Documentary
* Lifestyle Portraiture
* Moving Body Profiles
* Integrated Media Research
Tom Craig, Ph.D.
Scholar & Photographer in process
I am a Communicology scholar in the Niagara Region (Ontario, Canada) with a late-blooming passion for visual media and photographic composition. Over the last three years I have immersed myself in the photographic art and technologies of representation, light, texture and tonality, along with the shadowy details, saturated presence and ongoing social drama of presentation and conflicting interpretation. I am a Communicologist with a disability and a photographer in process focusing on the moving body across culture and discourse, interactive movement profiles, and the human experience of relation.
I shoot lifestyle portraits in disability and academic events with a special interest in the candid expression of conventional and non-conventional bodies. I am a lifelong learner -- curious, witty, persistent, tenacious -- with the eye and desire for bringing to light the bodies we live.
Take a look around in the galleries here and travel with me through the quirks and joys, gnomes and norms across a variety of bodily and cultural landscapes. Leave a note in the "add comment" section (at the bottom of every gallery page) and let me know that you were here.
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Except in the few cases where noted, all images are copyright of Thomas D. Craig, Ph.D. and may not be printed, shared, duplicated electronically or in any other way without written permission from the author.
Bio photo by Caleb Goodaker-Craig.
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The Eye and the Body I Call Mine
"Scientific thinking, a thinking which looks on from above, and thinks of the object-in-general, must return to the 'there is' which underlies it; to the site, the soil of the sensible and opened world such as it is in our life and for our body---not that possible body which we may legitimately think of as an information machine but that actual body I call mine, this sentinel standing quietly at the command of my words and my acts. Further, associated bodies must be brought forward along with my body--the 'others'...who haunt me and whom I haunt; the 'others' along with whom I haunt a single, present, and actual Being . . ." (Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Eye and Mind. In Primacy of Perception 1964, 160-161).