Dr Eugenie Shinkle
Dr Eugénie Shinkle is a photographer, writer, and theorist whose research explores the material, embodied, and political dimensions of photographic practice. Trained originally as a civil engineer, she brings a distinctive interdisciplinary approach to photography, drawing on art history, philosophy, landscape studies, fashion theory, and digital culture.
Her academic writing addresses themes including landscape and affect, the aesthetics of the banal, fashion photography, and sensory experience in digital environments. Both her critical writing and her artistic practice explore photography’s relationship to embodiment, temporality, and the politics of representation.
Shinkle’s photographic work engages with landscape in expanded terms—foregrounding atmosphere, sensation, and the nonhuman agency. Her practice is shaped by a commitment to minimalism, abstraction, and process-based image-making, often using ‘poor’ materials such as photocopies to explore slowness, repetition, and spatial disorientation. Drawing from both art-historical and geological timeframes, her work treats the photographic image as a site of encounter rather than a document of place. It has been exhibited, published, and featured in international platforms dedicated to contemporary photography.
A significant strand of Shinkle’s current research focuses on the photobook as a tactile, time-based medium. Her writing explores the sensory and embodied experience of photobooks, particularly how the act of viewing becomes entangled with gestures of touch, sequencing, and design. She is the Editor of C4 Journal, a platform dedicated to photobook criticism and writing. Through C4, she fosters dialogue around the photobook as both an artistic object and a space of critical inquiry—supporting emerging voices and expanding the conversation around materiality, authorship, and visual culture.
She is the author of Fashion Photography: The Story in 180 Images (Aperture, 2017) and editor of several influential volumes, including Fashion as Photograph and Emerging Landscapes: Between Production and Representation. Her scholarly articles appear in leading journals such as Art Journal, Fashion Theory, The Journal of Architecture, and Media, Culture and Society. She also contributes widely to exhibition catalogues and critical platforms, writing for artists, publishers, and institutions across Europe, North America, and Asia.
Selected publications
'The City Inhabits Me: Space, Topology and Gabriele Basilico's Milano: Ritratti di fabbriche, The Journal of Architecture, 24:8 (2019).
‘Painting, Photography, Photographs: George Shaw’s Landscapes’ in George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field. Mark Hallett, ed. Yale University Press, 2018.
‘The Feminine Awkward: Graceless Bodies and the Performance of Femininity in Fashion Photographs’, Fashion Theory 21:2 (2017)
Fashion Photography: the Story in 180 Pictures. Thames & Hudson, 2017.
‘The Universal Foreground: Ordinary Landscapes and Boring Photographs’, in Boredom Studies: Frameworks and Perspectives. London & New York: Routledge, 2016.
Emerging Landscapes: Between Production and Representation. (editor, with Davide Deriu and Krystallia Kamvasinou) London & New York: Routledge, 2014.
'Fashion's Digital Body: Clothing, Embodiment and Interactivity in New Fashion Media', in Fashion Media: Past and Present. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
'Uneasy bodies: affect, embodied perception, and contemporary fashion photography' in Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics. Bettina Papenburg & Marta Zarzycka (eds), London: I.B. Tauris, 2012.
'Video Games and the Digital Sublime', in Digital Cultures and the Politics of Emotion: Feelings, Affect and Technological Change. Athina Karatzogianni and Adi Kuntsman, eds. London: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2012. [originally published in Tate Papers Issue 14, 2010].
'Playing for the camera: Huizinga's Homo Ludens, technology, and the playful body in fashion photography' in Images in Time. Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir and Michael A. Langkjær (eds). Wunderkammer Press, 2011.
'Something in the Air: the Landscape Photography of John Myers', in John Myers (exhibition catalogue). Birmingham: Ikon Gallery, 2011.
Fashion as Photograph: Viewing and Reviewing Images of Fashion. London: I.B. Tauris, 2008.
'Video Games, Emotion, and the Six Senses', in Media, Culture and Society, Volume 30, No. 6 (November 2008).
‘Corporealis Ergo Sum: Affective Response in Digital Games’ in Digital Gameplay: Essays on the Nexus of Game and Gamer. Nate Garrelts, ed. McFarland & Co, 2005.
Boredom, Repetition, Inertia: the Aesthetics of the Banal in Contemporary Photography, Mosaic vol. 37, no. 4 (December 2004)