‘Indications of India’: Working with the Embodied Experience of Photography in Stella Snead’s Photographs, Photobooks, and Photo-Collages

This thesis examines the multifaceted artistic contributions of Stella Snead (1910–2006),
a painter, photographer, collagist, and traveller, with surrealist inclinations. Employing a
phenomenological approach to study the embodied experience of photography, it provides the
first extensive investigation and theoretical evaluation of Snead’s work and explores how her
work intersects with the studies of women artists, photography, and surrealism.

Over the past thirty years, there has been a resurgence of interest in women artists
associated with surrealism. While artists such as Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning,
Leonor Fini have become canonical women surrealists, Snead remains on the periphery and
receives little academic attention. This thesis, however, does not aim to simply insert Snead
into current historiographies. By examining her work through a phenomenological lens, it
offers a crucial perspective for evaluating Snead’s place in art history and reflecting on
potential issues within the historiographies of surrealism and women surrealists.
The first chapter examines Snead’s approach to travel and photography in India. The
second chapter focuses on Snead’s photobook Shiva’s Pigeons: An Experience of India
(1972) and her photographic exhibition People Figures–India (1982) as part of the Festival of
India (1982) to evaluate how these works challenge conventional representations of India.
The third chapter analayses Snead’s method of reinventing her personal photographic archive
to make photo-collages, aiming to understand the significance of manipulating embodied
experience and rewriting memories.

This thesis enhances the understanding of women photographers/artists who worked on
the margins of surrealism, contributing to the historiography of surrealism. Furthermore, it
experiments with a new dimension in the phenomenological approach to the studies of
photography and highlights the significance of examining archival materials, which
significantly contributes to the understanding of the artist’s working method and the
interconnectedness of the mediums.