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A Document That Transcends Itself: Between Abstraction And Reality, Seth Lewis

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In A Document that Transcends Itself: Between Abstraction and Reality, I first present a historical analysis of photography that complicates traditional assumptions of how photographs operate in the world. Rather than functioning as merely an objective record, the photograph takes on a dual status as both a document and an abstraction from reality. The photograph’s ability to selectively decontextualize the origins from which it came from and present itself as something other than what it simply records becomes the core of my artistic practice. This paper will also discuss my conceptual investigations into how we perceive photographs when they …

Hearing Through Walls, Bradley Marshall

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The photographer discusses work in “Hearing Through Walls”, a Masters of Fine Arts thesis exhibit held at downtown Tipton Gallery from February 19th through March 2nd, 2018. The exhibition consists of 15 archival inkjet prints and one two-channel video piece, representing the artists three-year exploration into narrative forms in image making. Using non-traditional approaches to photographic portraiture and experimental exhibition layout, the artist forms questions around themes of domesticity, lost youth, and American masculinity. Among these themes is an investigation into photographic issues, including the cultural role that photographs play in perpetuating, miming, and disrupting the facades of everyday life. …

Paradise Entertainment's Feature Of The Week: Splint, Brittney Callahan

MFA in Photography and Integrated Media Theses

Watching television has been part of my daily ritual since childhood. Every time it was turned on, I was able to enter into new worlds that were exotic compared to my house. Each story on the screen filled me with hope, inspired me with passion, and took me to a place where everything, no matter how terrible, seemed to have a purpose, an arc, and an end. These visual narratives birthed the idea of an equational life, one that seemed simple and mathematical. After I realized that life couldn’t be firmly calculated, I decided to invent my own alternative realities …

Stepfamily, Rebecca Chappelear

MFA in Photography and Integrated Media Theses

A discussion of the photographic imagery used in artist's work and a first-hand account of the experience which lead to it's creation. The work and writing encapsulate the trauma caused by family dysfunction brought on by a stepfather's struggle with depression and alcoholism.

In-Between: The Spaces Of Modernity, Elisa Fabris Valenti

LSU Master's Theses

During the past three years as a graduate student, I have experienced loneliness. Having recently emigrated from Italy, I have often asked myself why I am experiencing such hard times adjusting to a different country. My thesis explores this question. Referring to Marc Augé’s idea of non-place, I have chosen a geographical and spatial starting point to approach my work. Italian cities are built around the central piazza where social, political, and economic life revolves. In my thesis, I depict American spaces that lack specific location and create solitude within the urban corridors. Private feelings, such as loneliness, are paradoxes …

Agency Panic: A Reckoning Of Place, Brock M. Mickelsen

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Agency Panic: A Reckoning of Place may be best described as a type of documentation of a conversation between the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness and myself, one where a mutual language is not spoken but one where some understanding can be reached none-the-less. By moving through the landscape without goals or intentions a physical exchange ensues, a push and pull, a call and response, intimacy is gained through tactile experience. Through the use of wet-plate collodion photography I am able to create imagery that engages directly with the place. Its vulnerability records a conversation between two acting powers, artist …

Xx Openings, Jackson Siegal

Senior Projects Spring 2018

XX Openings represents my dual sculpture and photography practice. The title comes from a 70’s domestic frame, with 20 openings of varying sizes for family pictures. Half of the slots were filled with stock pictures of smiling family scenes, while the others just had measurements for the openings themselves. The object struck me as alienating, and oppressive. I didn’t see any scene within those openings I felt connected to.

The frame came to symbolize varying perspectives, ways of seeing, and ways of being. As my sculpture practice has weighed more heavily on my work as a photographer, I feel tensions …

The Hour Of The Wolf, Emily Louise Beresford

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

the hour of the wolf

In these photographs I try to capture the sense of time moving and changing. I am interested in the way that light can change the way we see something. We are made vulnerable by what light reveals.

The photographs are about a specific time of day as well as time passing over a year. The interweaving of faces and landscapes reveals this progression of time during the days, the seasons, and the years through which each person has lived.

With time, light moves across …

I Have Never Stepped In The Same River Twice, Madison Hailey Emond

Senior Projects Spring 2018

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” – Heraclitus

I never knew that I would learn to walk the Sawkill River in moonlight, that I would come to know its contours and the depths of its waters so well. I never expected that the tree roots and rocks that lay in my path to its banks would know my gait so fully.

This project began as a reaction to the hurricanes that struck the Caribbean last fall. It felt apt to question landscape imagery and how …

American Idyll: A Place To Call Home, Bowen Walsh Fernie

Senior Projects Spring 2018

I was raised in Italy from the age of five and when I returned to the United States at eighteen, I was surprised by the way I was affected by the landscape I had never known or explored. I found myself drawn to American culture as it is stereotypically represented in movies and TV - the quaint houses, the schools with cheerleaders and locker rooms, the drive-in movie theaters – and began to examine how those stereotypes are reflected in the real world. From this initial interest I began exploring the American space that I envisioned myself inhabiting throughout my …