Digital Commons Network^™

Letting The Light In, Owen Riley

All Theses

LETTING THE LIGHT IN
Owen Riley Jr.
December 2010
ABSTRACT
'Forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.' Leonard Cohen
My thesis is a visual meditation on the transitions of life, death, love and emotion that come with age and responsibility. It is what I can touch and feel viewed through the frame of domesticity. It is a ballad of introspection, melancholy and hope redefining the beauty that has been masked by the fractures of time.
My thesis presents my self-created visions of the reality that surrounds me channeled through the 19th. …

Ordinary Spirits In An Extraordinary Town: Finding Identity In Personal Images And Resurrected Memories In Lily Dale, New York, Mary Catherine Gaydos Gabriel

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Every summer, Lily Dale, New York, a community founded on spiritualist beliefs and steeped in an eccentric explosive past, hosts thousands of visitors seeking to communicate with dead friends and relatives, while the residents lead ordinary lives in the midst of the supernatural hype permeating their town. Their stories are considered by most to be secondary to the illustrious trappings of the community in which they occurred. My research employs oral histories prompted by personal photographs to showcase the residents' everyday experiences amidst the town's infamy, illuminating the undervalued individual experience of those living in communities of such extraordinary repute. …

More Real Than Real : An Anthropological And Phenomenological Exploration Of Imagistic Sacred Space In The Contemporary Elegy And Fine Art Photograph., Amy Liann Tudor 1968-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The creation of liminal spaces has been used for centuries cross-culturally to create sacred or taboo meanings in rituals, people, places, or objects. Liminality is constructed by the overlapping of cultural categories and "ruptures" an object or event's connotations, imbuing it with new and often transcendent or spiritually charged meaning. The photograph is an example of liminal space, since it freezes even the living in a state of corpse-like stasis. With the invention of this new medium, as well as its application to memorializing the dead, previous forms of commemorating death such as the eulogy and the poetic elegy were …

Changing The Traditional High School Photography Curriculum: Integrating Traditional And Digital Technologies, Julie A. Cooper

Art and Design Theses

This thesis presents a photography curriculum for a beginning high school level photography class. It is designed as a teaching guide to structure a photography class that incorporates both film photography and digital photographic technology. One of the biggest challenges for teachers of photography is how to structure a curriculum with a limited number of enlargers and space in the darkroom, while incorporating digital technology with limited computer access for students. The curriculum presented here includes three major parts: a traditional photographic film component, a digital photography component, and a concepts component where students will experiment with different photographic techniques …

Flat Files: The Absence Of Vernacular Photography In Museum Collections, Kimberly Wolfe

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will explore the causes and consequences of the absence of vernacular photography from museum collections. Through historical analysis of vernacular photography and a close interpretation of a contemporary family snapshot, I will argue that vernacular photographs are important objects of great cultural significance and poignant personal meaning. Photography has always defied categorization. It serves multiple functions and roles, is studied in a vast number of disciplines, and exists in a variety of institutions and collections. Furthermore, it is difficult to classify a single photograph. Vernacular photography thus poses a challenge to museum methods of sorting documents, artifacts, and …

Reposition, Ratna Khanna

Theses

Landscape should be an instrument of cultural force. This work contemplates the relationship between the artificial and the natural. It resulted from thinking about matters concerning my interactions with public space; the combination of nature and the culture we inflict upon it. By including "nature" here, I use it to denote an outside environment that includes biological activity that is untamed, yet still capable of being influenced by human agency. This human agency takes the form of culture, that which appropriates nature towards our social needs. Hence, this agency benefits the formation of landscapes. A cultural artifact such as an …

Slow & Steady, Christin Boggs

Theses

Slow & Steady explores the contemporary movement away from mass-produced food and towards creative alternatives that offer vitality and potency to participants and their surroundings. Within the Greater Rochester Region, individuals have rejected convenience food to responsibly grow, prepare and share sustenance in cooperative groups. The photographs in this thesis depict scenes from community gardens, community supported agriculture (CSA) farms, farmers markets, and other organizations associated with local food production. Here exists a community of resourceful people, coming together in pursuit of good food. Slow & Steady points to one of the ways in which art can effect social change …

From Then Until Now, Nick Marshall

Theses

The photograph may create a sense of nostalgia and longing for the past, but that past is not an authentic one. It is a past that has been mediated through a lens and by a photographer who is already mediated by cultural and societal norms and beliefs. Yet this past is both familiar and foreign at the same time. From Then Until Now is a series of visual investigations and physical manipulations of the photograph--particularly the snapshot. I utilize the photograph for its dual role as an objective index and as an aid for the subjective nature of memories. In …

A Life Reviewed: George Eastman Through The Viewfinder, Emma Powell

Theses

How do we look back on a time that has gone by? On a life that is over? How do we appraise and commemorate those responsible for making photography what it is today? A Life Reviewed: George Eastman through the Viewfinder addresses the legacy of George Eastman, the founder of Kodak and one of photography's most significant entrepreneurs. A visionary who sought to expand the scope of photography from the wealthy to the average person, he recognized photography's power in the context of many scientific advances in industry and society. A Life Reviewed serves as visual biography as well as …

Insequential Sequence, Gary Garbett

Theses and Dissertations

Since childhood, my passion to create has driven me to search for the simplest truths within the world I live in. Throwbacks of pop culture have always decorated my life and their influences are directly reflected in my work. The nightly news, advertisements, pulp magazines, film, and music all play an extremely important role in my work as each influence becomes a layer of spirit and emotion in my mixed media paintings and photography. It’s those ordinary and mundane gifts that I find in each normal day that spill the truth and the essence of my life into my art. …

The Mcfarlands: "One Season"., John Edwin May

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is in support of the Master of Fine Arts exhibition entitled The McFarlands at East Tennessee State University, Slocumb Galleries, Johnson City, Tennessee, November 5^th - 9^th, 2007. This artist's photographic survey, which lasted approximately two years, investigated the lifeworld of a family in a rural Appalachian town. His photographic work depicts the subjects working on their farm growing tobacco and their relationships within the family unit.

The artist discusses his work in terms of historical and contemporary influences with an emphasis on the relationship to the work of Lewis W. Hine, Wright Morris, …

Photomicrography As An Artistic Medium, Nicholas James Eubank

Master's Theses

This thesis investigated the problems associated with artistically photographing patterns that exist within the microscopic world echoed on a larger scale throughout nature. Photographing these patterns at a microscopic level presented a number of difficulties not associated with photographing patterns through traditional photographic means. This thesis explored the problems associated with photographing subjects on a microscopic level, specifically the issues presented by lighting subjects. Experimental techniques with multiple light sources as well as light spectrum were explored. Also explored was the history of microscopy and popular processes for modern microscopy. Images were created utilizing either a compound microscope or stereomicroscope …

Matter Of Taste, Maria Loduca

Theses

My thesis Matter of Taste illustrates how art and design distinctly overlap. My aim was to move fluidly between art, design, and craft. This thesis represents my observation of the ways in which art and design are embedded in our daily life and culture. I began to apply photography to a greater variety of fields. Advances in printing technology now mean that images can be printed on just about anything, from garden buckets and mugs to paper towels and wardrobes. In my thesis, I also questioned how photography can be used as an object and a design element. In terms …

A Visual Understanding: An Interactive Learning Application, Joanna Ward

Theses

As a thesis project, A Visual Understanding can be defined as a contextual experiment portraying the relationship between traditional composition techniques and visual communication online. This project focuses on the issue of significance when viewing photography online and the ways in which Computer Graphics Design can solve this problem. The educational application address the problems with the way in which photography is being portrayed by first, creating awareness about this concern and second, educating the online user in attempt to solve this problem. The interactive application developed educates users on traditional composition theories that have proven to be successful means …

Incognesia, Holly George

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

A monograph for the MFA Thesis Exhibition for Holly George, exhibited in Sawhill Gallery in Duke Hall April 5, 2010 - April 10, 2010. The title of the exhibition, Incognesia, is indicative of the artist's process of mapmaking. It is a fusion of other words, an invention based on fact but nevertheless on the verge of fantasy. Like each word in Lewis Caroll's poem, "Jabberwocky," the title calls multiple meanings to mind. It utilizes the Latin incognitae, meaning "unknown," but also references its later cartographic usage of "undiscovered" lands. While the suffix, -nesia, links to a series of islands such …

Apparent Fate, 2010: Dismantling The Notion Of Photographic Truth, Kelsey M. Macdonald

Scripps Senior Theses

When creating a current work, artists cannot ignore the images that have preceded theirs. The history of a medium and the related history of subject matter is vital to the meaning of a new art work. Each sign and symbol has a connotation out of the artists’ control. The developed meaning of a symbol is inseparable for the viewer regardless of the acknowledgment of that meaning by the artist. To work with imagery and not address it’s historical context is to perpetuate it’s meaning. The only way to not state what has already been stated is to critically engage with …

The Gold Line: Exploring The Resurgence Of Public Rail Transport In Los Angeles, Simrat L. Dugal

Scripps Senior Theses

Mass transit in the form of light rail is, in many ways, a new and revolutionary idea for the Greater Los Angeles Area. Although mass light rail transit did exist in Los Angeles in the form of the Pacific Electric Railways red car system, an extensive network of metro rail lines has never existed in Los Angeles County since Pacific Electric was dismantled and shut down in 1950. Because of this, the popular mode of transport in LA County has traditionally been cars, and public transport has consisted mostly of bus routes. This has all changed in the last few …

Some Kind Of Familiar Image, Brian Nogues

All Theses

I make images about images, sometimes about the ones that already exist in a given photographic outlet - be it the media, the web, magazines, periodicals, or the canon of art history, and occasionally, I make images fueled by the philosophy and aesthetics of these channels.
My role as a photographer is not that of a problem solver but rather a locator and creator of visual discrepancies. I locate something that strikes me as interesting or curious, perhaps the gaze of a dog in an Erwitt photograph, and then I find something else that is equally compelling, and combine them …

Legacy, Jamie Callahan

Theses

This thesis is an examination of family in relation to labor, as expressed through photography. My thesis exhibition, Legacy, grew out of a personal financial struggle while pursuing my graduate studies. Finding myself unable to find work to support my education, I began to travel back home to Chicago to work in my family's house painting business. These journeys to home sparked an epiphany creating a realization that the family business, from which I considered my enrollment at RIT an escape, was actually my salvation. The business I felt I had run from was now supporting my photographic ambitions. I …

Mind, Body, And Handwoven Cloth, Andrea Donnelly

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores the nature of individual perception, and the side of our lives lived entirely within our minds. I do this through the lens of self-reflection, examining the images of my own mental life and translating them into delicately handwoven cloth. These images and their structures become sensory experiences of the intangible, and a meeting place for my internal life and that of my viewer. The cloth I weave is simultaneously familiar and strange. Through woven surface and imbedded imagery, I attempt to illuminate the deep emotions that necessarily isolate us from each other, and the shared experiences of …

Elevating Communication, Thao Thanh Nguyen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The products of vehicular transportation have led the modern traveler into a crisis of place. The modern journey that is held within ceaseless flux, confine movement to edges facilitating prompt passage yet negating active participation. These edges govern movement, highlighting points of destination while simultaneously obscuring our journey in between travels. The limited participation and extended observation of one's place within the concurring boundaries renders the senses dormant, causing passivity and reluctance to participate or communicate with the city. These lines of movement, demanding our attention toward beginning and end but omitting the middle, transforms the city, home, and place …

Visual Stamp, Jeanay Fullerton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I create images in a painterly manner illustrating a visual dialog, which suggests simultaneous moments, yet are actually a separated collision of moments and time. I have stretched these ideas from a slowed manipulation of time, to a calculated capture of segmented moments. My work undermines the importance of the decisive moment theory. This theory was the catalyst for my new series, VISUAL STAMP. "The decisive moment, it is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression." - …

Divining The Divine: Pop Mythology And Its Worth, James Hall

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My thesis compares classic mythology of cultures like ancient Greece to the mythology that has risen from the popular culture of contemporary western civilizations like America. While there are some differences, the two use the same archetypes that humanity has used for generations. In my work I use sculpture and photography to show their similarities and differences in form and story.

Place, Space, And Form Captured Through Photographic Meditation, Sarah Stead

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Inspired by Buddhist philosophy, the photographic series Architectural Zen attempts to beautify banal and pragmatic architecture through limiting and preexisting artificial light conditions. The selective illumination of artificial light eliminates the non-essential details and enhances the pure forms and saturated color presented by the camera lens. This encourages the photographer and the viewer to enter a state of meditation. The resulting process is similar to a Zen approach to image making. The ancient Zen artist's compositions are strengthened by a meditation on form and subsequent elimination of the non-essential elements of the subject. Through embracing this Zen mentality and mindfulness,aspects …

Extra Ordinary, Lana Waldrep

Theses and Dissertations

The title of this thesis Extra Ordinary is intentionally ambiguous. Depending on how you read it, it can refer to either the very ordinary or to that which is outside of the ordinary.The works described within these pages functions similarly. From person to person and with time they move from the ordinary to beyond and back again. How can something be both mysterious and understood at the same time? How can I as a painter create a space where diametrically opposed forces can coexist and what is the effect of viewing such an object? This thesis addresses these issues with …

Family Reunion, Carly Miller

Theses

This thesis, Family Reunion examines notions of family heritage, collection, and intimacy through the use of photographic portraiture. I observe the ways in which large format photography contributes to a larger photographic endeavor involving time and travel to investigate family relationships and genealogy. The thesis also addresses how American culture acquires, records, stores, preserves, displays, and passes on family photographs. Familial objects either preserve or lose meaning as they are passed down through generations. Family Reunion emphasizes the collection of images we preserve to record and represent our familial history, while addressing both personal and cultural significance between the need …

Acceptance Through Art And Technology: Learning, Linking And Creating Waves In The World From The Root Of Personal Culture, Tami Rene' Thomas Mehus

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

As an educator, my role is not only to teach academia, but to also create lessons that encourage personal growth. My goal is to help my students find a new interest or perspective on life, and gain greater self-awareness and appreciation. Initially the objective of my final creative project was to introduce the art form of photography and have my students explore and document personal culture. My students used epals.com to exchange their photographs with students from other countries to make cultural connections. I wanted this electronic exchange to exhibit differences and similarities my students shared with students across the …

Integral Bits, Lance Schmittling

Master's Theses

My goal is to create projects that are different, fresh, unique, and bale to stand alone when compared to my other work. This is an important ability for me to possess since it shows my extensive knowledge of design and my willingness to work hard at creating exceptional ideas

Stereotype And Representation Of Near And Middle Eastern Peoples In La Bande Dessinee, Brandon Matthew Thomas

LSU Master's Theses

Representation of social groups in the comics is serious. In 2006, a series of twelve cartoons published in a Danish newspaper sparked a controversy that precipitated the deaths of hundreds of people. The images depicted Mohammed and other images that supposedly mocked Islam. All across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa protesters paraded through the streets, some calling for the death of the cartoonists. Trials in Europe over the publication of these cartoons resulted in several firings. Counter protests have also arisen. These protesters found grievance with the firings, claiming that the freedom of the press was being violated …

Rooted: A New Generation Of Farmers And Ranchers In Montana, Beth Jeannette Gibson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Rooted tells the stories of a new generation of farmers and ranchers in Montana through still photography and written profiles; the project is the result of 13 site visits and interviews. I define “new farmer” as a person operating their own agricultural business for 10 years or fewer, though this definition gets blurred and complicated when referring to people who return to their family’s farm or ranch. Admittedly, this project features only a few of the beginning farmers and ranchers in Montana. My intention is not to provide an exhaustive study of the next generation of farmers and ranchers in …