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Franz Roh And Visual Juxtaposition In Foto-Auge, Irini Zervas

Theses and Dissertations

This study of Foto-Auge (1929) is grounded on the approach of Franz Roh and aims to unlock the book’s meaning through an analysis of layout and visual sequence. This thesis also demonstrates how Foto-Auge proclaims photography’s ability not merely to record, but to disrupt any sense of reality in images.

All Glory Is Fleeting, Steven Beswick

CGU MFA Theses

The statement is specifically linked to my MFA thesis exhibition.

In The Kitchen, Amber Eckersley

All Theses

This series of work explores the fragmented nature of memory, investigates the dynamism of my grandma's kitchen, and subverts nostalgia typically associated with the South. Each image in the series represents a particular memory, set of memories, or fragment of memories from my childhood of planting, growing, and picking food with my grandma as well as preserving it and cooking it with her. The ordering and decision making of what fragments go in which image is imprecise. The imprecision is a reflection of how memory operates - fragmented, mutable, and fleeting. The markings on the pots, remnants of food processes, …

Camera Obscura, Dan Latourette

Theses

Camera Obscura is a feature-length script about a 19th-century photographer who must document the unraveling Civil War while struggling to come to terms with deaths of his loved ones. It is a historical fiction film about memory, death, and human costs.

Rutherford Holding, an adept yet recluse photographer, stands between a mobilizing country bound for war and the trauma of losing his loved ones years ago. As those around him enlist and prepare in nationalistic fervor for what is to be the American Civil War, Holding desires to evade any chance to meet death face-to-face once again. However, he pigeonholes …

Porous Time And Space In Contemporary Photography: How Social Constructions Of Space And Reenactment Produce Alternative Histories, Emma Brooke Lehrer Stein

Art & Art History ETDs

This dissertation examines how the photograph can exceed the long-rooted debate around medium specific notions of photographic truth, since all realisms are historical and constantly changing. Applying theories of socially constructed space and porous time to analysis of these case studies presents alternative photographic histories that show past and present together. Boris Mikhailov, as a dissident artist and post-Soviet documentarian of new Russian capitalism, presents histories of visual culture that compete and overlap during the Soviet era and afterward. Mikhailov refers to the multiplicity of voices found in his photographic practice as a state of “coexistence.” Looking at photographs of …

The Impact Of Photography On Tourism: Photography Construction Perspective, Justin Kaewnopparat

Doctoral Dissertations

Photographs are crucial elements that marketers integrate into all their marketing communication tools. As we can see from many brochures, websites, and billboards, many travel destinations portray the beauty of their locations through photographs aiming to attract more travelers to visit their destinations. In the same vein, tourists also use photographs as references for their decisions about where to spend their vacations. Due to this significant impact of photographs on tourism, marketers invest greatly in this visual stimulation tool. However, the impact of elements appearing in each photograph such as objects and color tones are overlooked. This experimental study investigates …

Traces Of The (Un)Familiar : Family, Identity, And The Return Of The Repressed In The Photographs Of Ralph Eugene Meatyard., Hunter Martin Kissel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the ways in which photographs by Ralph Eugene Meatyard provoke the uncanny—or Das unheimlich as Freud originally wrote in 1919—by breaking from conventions of mid-twentieth century family photography often utilized to establish and maintain genealogical unity. Meatyard’s photographs of his family and friends are accentuated by blurring techniques, prolonged exposures, and the incorporation of dime-store masks, and as a result depict moments when reality is disrupted by the return of repressed material from childhood. For a multitude of reasons, Meatyard’s photographs elicit comparisons to Surrealist photography as well as certain American modernists who also explored the notion …

Collaboration Revisited: The Performative Art Of Claude Cahun And Hannah Weiner, Phillip L. Griffith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In its most common usage in the artistic context, collaboration refers to a practice of creation in which two artists work together to produce a single artwork or object. Collaboration Revisited: The Performative Art of Claude Cahun and Hannah Weiner focuses on the nexus of photography, writing, and performance in the work of six female avant-garde artists from the transatlantic twentieth century, informed by the important place of surrealism in that history, to reconsider this understanding of collaboration. Instead of the notion of collaboration as founded in the experience of two artists working together in each others’ presence, I examine …

Cokato Through August Akerlund's Lens, Johanna M. Ellison

Culminating Projects in History

Swedish immigrant turned United States citizen August (Gust) Akerlund captured Cokato’s history through his photography from 1902-1950. Today, Akerlund’s photography studio and 14,019 negative collection are preserved due to the care of Akerlund’s family, the staff of the Cokato Museum, and the community of Cokato. Although Akerlund’s collection and studio provides a window into Cokato’s past, the few published works that mention Cokato do not utilize both Akerlund’s life and his photographs as complementary sources. This thesis is an attempt to rectify this neglect by using Akerlund’s resources (including his photographs, life story, and studio) to question the popular perception …

Naturally Occurring Form, Margaret Kristensen

Masters Theses

I am trying to find art in my body, attempting to create images that personalize and desexualize the nude. Between the body of images that we have access to via social media and the images we have seen of female nudes, emphasis is put on finding the form to be within western society’s acceptable range of beautiful; so rarely do we find organic figures existing in the photographic environment.

Having been taught how to photograph the body by looking at images of women taken by men, I don’t see myself. The photographs by Edward Weston and Irving Penn look, gaze, …

Same Stuff, Just Packaged A Different Way (Maybe It's Not So Bad?), Kyle Strobel

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Who Would You Be? examines the interplay between person and persona, relationship building, and artist-sitter dynamics. By placing contemporary sitters in the context of historical portraiture conventions, it seeks to lead viewers to consider the issue of self-absorption and vanity in social media profiles from a different angle. Additionally, this project became a way to enhance the quality of my personal relationships with those involved through providing a space to interact and creating a link for them between myself and each other.

Encounter: Alone In The Woods, Max Zagor

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Encounter aims to take the viewer into the darkest parts of the mind through my own journey into the woods. With the images, my work attempts to capture a pure level of the fear that I felt as I ventured into the woods, alone, at night to experience the emotions I wanted to show. Similarly, Encounter deals with why we see what we see; as in, why do we think we see Bigfoot in the shadows? Where does that idea come from? Through my research, I work to prove that our culture has implanted the imagery and thoughts of monsters …

The Process That Eats Itself, Brent Houzenga

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Chance and the found object set the stage for artworks that illustrate the clash between the everyman, popular culture and high art. The investigation of my process, surroundings and interests leads to an infinite amount of possibilities in a process that is beginning to eat itself.

Everything, Everything Seemed Once-Upon-A-Time, Denisse Leung Liu

CGU MFA Theses

The pleasant feeling of being relaxed is what I want the viewer to feel with my work. The art I make is the source of peacefulness and tranquility I treasure, in a way that there is tranquility and absence of noise, yet it whispers quietly to the viewer.

Everything, Everything Seemed Once-Upon-A-Time, Denisse Leung Liu

CGU MFA Theses

The pleasant feeling of being relaxed is what I want the viewer to feel with my work. The art I make is the source of peacefulness and tranquility I treasure, in a way that there is tranquility and absence of noise, yet it whispers quietly to the viewer.

The Creatures Come Out To Play, Megan Crocker

Student Projects

Study on the real vs not real of imagination that captures the mind. To take something that seems so out of touch with reality and bring it to life in photographs.

A Corpus In First-Person: Weegee And The Performance Of The Self, Emily Annis

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the varied platforms that the Austrian-born New York photographer Weegee engaged with to perform his public self-fashioning from the beginning of his career as a news photographer in the mid-1930s through the publication of his first two photo-books, Naked City (1945) and Weegee’s People (1946).

Picturing Queer Death: Alternative Instantiations Of Temporality Within Process Art, Jainey Jung Yeon Kim

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

During the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, the U.S.’ hegemonic heteronormative society saw AIDS as an epidemic threat to the future rather than as a threat to the present, which helped mark queer bodies affected by the virus as being erasable and replaceable. In response to this rise in fear and rage as the only potential affective productions of AIDS-related deaths, much of the queer art produced during this time sought to capture the permanence as well as ephemerality of queer desire and mourning. This project seeks to locate these alternative instantiations of temporality within queer art’s vivification of death …

The Feeling Of Being Ok, Benjamin B. Lee

Art and Design Theses

The Feeling of Being OK is an exhibition of appropriated imagery from unknown abandoned collections. Using the tension found in the enigmatic aspects of these materials, I investigate the fragility of the photograph and its capacity to fabricate memory and narrative. Designed to be a meditation on William Faulkner’s 1930 novel As I Lay Dying, this series focuses on themes including empathy and indifference, instability of identity, and life’s inevitable fate. By incorporating found materials such as vernacular objects and text into the installation, the potential for meaning is broadened. The work is installed in constellations or vignettes, allowing …

A Few Weeks, Maybe Months…, Tyler D. Mann

Art and Design Theses

A few weeks, maybe months… is an exhibition of photographs that contemplates the societal expectations of the gender binary in the context of travel. The work considers the intersection of manhood with my transgender identity and examines definitions of masculinity and gender. The American road trip is historically a masculine rite of passage which in my case will never fully come to pass. Discrepancies in imagery throughout the work interrupt the conventional narrative structure of the road trip. Acknowledging that the acquisition of masculinity is a futile act, the journey then becomes a complex act of reconciliation.

Duality, The Methodology Of Shooting A Documentary As A One-Man Crew, James Mcmahen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will discuss Duality, a long-form documentary about artistic nude models who also create art involving the nude female form. This thesis will discuss the inspiration for the film, as well as the deciding factors that made me choose this as the topic for my thesis documentary.

This thesis will also cover the process and methodology of shooting a documentary as a one-man crew, beginning with the process of preproduction, then the principal photography of the documentary, followed by the editing and postproduction process, and finally premiering the final film.

From A Traveling Daughter: A Photographic Memoir, Lilian Murnen

Honors Projects

“World sits outside the door, A voice in your heart is calling, The ends of the world await, Traveling daughter, Feel the sunshine on your face, Starlight guides your feet, Earth and Sky will carry you, Journey after journey, One mountain to the next, Voice in your heart is calling.” (Abigail Washburn, “Song of the Traveling Daughter” translated from Mandarin Chinese)

My family keeps me safe, but it is this safety that protects me from the discomfort that is necessary for growth. Like Abigail Washburn’s “voices,” my discontent and my curiosity call me to venture far beyond what I can …

Meat Cake, Todd Wilson Reynolds

MSU Graduate Theses

There is a language being spoken in visual art; a rhetorical dis­course that uses semiotics to communicate with a viewer. My research has fo­cused on way s to break the traditional ideas of narrative in photography . By focusing on the forms of delivery, and by combining digital and ana­logue techniques, my work forms a distortion of communication that forms a new language to communicate with the viewer. Much of this research has led to a specific form of communication that has been termed "punk" which began as a musical and artistic movement in the 70's. This sty le, both …

Maybe Somewhere West, Katie Efstathiou

Theses

Maybe Somewhere West is a photographic installation where a playful landscape is used as a stage to questioned how the naming of place relates to stereotypes found within the gender binary. Through found materials, photographs, and projections I am examining the interchangeable nature of virtual and material consumption of nature, while omitting any specific locale. The nameless landscape becomes an escape as well as a barrier, displaying the complexities of ingrained gender language. The term “namelessness” describe the unmarked purity of both the landscape and the androgynous self.

Picking At Scabs, Robert Gordon

Theses

Picking at Scabs is a body of photographic work that engages with the fragile and unreliable nature of memory. The book and installation address, with differing levels of narrative clarity, my adolescent struggles with my father’s alcoholism. In an accompanying book, Five-lined Skink, photographs from the family album are curated and annotated to reclaim the structure and narrative of the photographic record and act as a visual and thematic counterpoint.

The autobiographical work uses recent photographs, images from my personal archive, and photographs from the family album to create an emotional space described by writing. Photographs range from unsettling images …

Horizon Cross : A Parafictional History Through Photographs., Tom Legoff

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Horizon Cross: A Parafictional History Through Photographs is a body of work that dwells within the intersection between truth and fiction in photography. It is informed by the history of hoax photographs and my fascination with the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland and black holes, the space-time boundary of which is known as an event horizon. I have imagined into being a community in northern Ontario Province, equipped with the technology of the mid-nineteenth century but also with concepts far ahead of their time. To portray the inhabitants of Horizon Cross I have created photographic portraits of fictional people that …

The Third Coast, Catherine Jane Davis

Theses and Dissertations

The Third Coast is a photographic exploration of the vernacular landscape of the US Gulf Coast. Stretching some 1,600 miles from the mouth of the Rio Grande in Texas to the Florida Everglades, America's southernmost shore is vast and complex. The region is a patchwork of both the natural and built environments, a tangled combination of history and geography, culture and ecology that reflects an intimate and ever-evolving relationship between man, land and sea. The Gulf Coast resists tidy hierarchies or easy classification. Rather, the rhythms of the region comprise its own syntax, a way in which seemingly dissimilar locations …

Seeking The Invisible, Alexis Bragg

Theses and Dissertations

Seeking The Invisible is a photography portrait series which explores the internal context of those suffering from invisible illness. This body of work examines the interior worlds of those often stigmatized as “outsiders,” and those who seek to be acknowledged beyond their illness. When one is told of another’s physical malady with no visible indicators of a problem, skepticism or outright disbelief is an unfortunately likely response. By asking my subjects “What would a portrait of your life look like?” I sought to observe the interior world of this subset and empower my subjects as something more than their illness.

Ghost Water Exhibition, Michael G. Sharp

Theses and Dissertations

The Ghost Water exhibition of artworks by Michael Sharp was comprised of four main works titled: 30 x 60 Minute Grid Series, Suspension, History/Prehistory, and Lake Bonneville Remnants. The artwork was created as a reaction to the land that once held the prehistoric Lake Bonneville and to its current remnant Great Salt Lake. The work explores the dialogue between absence and presence.

Photography Based Art With Youth Affected By Autism, Teal K. Gordon

Art and Design Honors Theses

Research suggests children with autism gravitate towards visual rather than social communication, and do so with a leveled understanding. For example, studies show, children with ASD receive a black and white cartoon drawing differently than a color photograph. Based on this notion, this study explores a form of art making with photographs as a foundation to facilitate artistic expression and communication. Children and their immediate families were photographed against a white background. These photographs were printed out and given to the child to “finish” the picture with whatever material they find comfortable. A total of two participants were included in …