'Falling into Photography: Of Loss, Desire and the Photographic' examines the relationship between loss, desire and the photographic. Within Teichmann's writing, photographic works and film pieces, the slippages between different spaces and temporalities of the imaginary. The thesis is comprised of chapters which read as three  interlinked essays with and introduction and conclusion, and find their main point of overlap and focus within the visual practice; the object, encounter and process of the photographic.

Introduction: Mourning and Melancholia: Loss and the Origins of Fantasy and Desire
I. The Skin of the Image: Touching the Untouchable
II. Slipping between Bodies: The Mother's Body/The Lover's Body
III. Red Room, Dark Room, Liquid: The Hallucinatory Space of the Darkroom
Conclusion: Fascinated Adjacency – The Art Object; Ever-shifting Transitional Object

Desire and fear of loss are subtly and yet powerfully evoked in these explorations of the visceral and expressive properties of the human psyche and skin, and the slippage between the maternal body and that of the lover. Both bodies remind and insist upon our own separate existence, both inherently bound to loss and desire. Exactly at the point of contact with the other are we most acutely aware of our own skin, our own boundaries.

Central to the work lies an exploration of the origins of fantasy and desire and how these are bound to experiences of loss and representation.

"Esther Teichmann’s watery, slippery world of another order is also taboo. In Silently Mirrored, the viewer slips and slides between photographs of the exuberance of her husband’s black skin (so dark that it hails deep sea blue) and photographs of the exuberance of her mother’s white skin (so white that it hails sky blue). In Teichmann’s black (body) and blue (washcloth) landscape of touching feelings, made of breath, water and skin, one is bruised (black and blue) by naked love."

"Teichmann’s utopian island-world lies somewhere between black and blue seas, between here and now and the fantasy of where one might go, or perhaps, even, where one has been. At the heart of the work is the experience of the primal loss of the mother, who necessarily turns away, as Teichmann’s mother does in some of the photograph."

Carol Mavor, 'Love in Black and Blue'

For the Stillend Gespiegelt series, Carol Mavor (University of Manchester, published by Duke University Press) composed a piece of writing entitled 'Love in Black and Blue' (2007). In this text (within an exhibition catalogue), Mavor subtly interweaves her poetic interpretation of Teichmann's works with critical readings of Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva.