Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Picturing Consumer Culture, Cultural Hybridity, And Womanhood: Farah Al Qasimi’S Photographs From 2012 To 2020, Minji Lee

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Farah Al Qasimi’s 2012-2020 color photographs, arguing that this work presents a distinctive and salient critique of domesticity, material culture, and womanhood in the UAE. Through her lens as a woman and a culturally hybrid subject, Al Qasimi explores the tensions of modernization, globalization, consumerism, and gender.

"This Other Way": Photography At Black Mountain College, Kyle Canter

Theses and Dissertations

Relying on the photographic collections of the Western Regional Archives in Asheville, NC, as well as oral histories, personal correspondence, course notes, official college records, and other archival material, this thesis examines the history and pedagogy of photography at Black Mountain College.

"How Is Photography?": Robert Heinecken's Photographic Concept At The University Of California, Los Angeles, 1960–1991, Noa Wesley

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the photography program Robert Heinecken established at UCLA, highlighting his interest in teaching photography as an idea rather than a technologically inflected medium. This pedagogical model provides a lens through which I trace the work of three of his students: Maria Nordman, John Divola, and Uta Barth.

Making And Taking: Evaluating The Ethnographic Gaze In Graciela Iturbide’S Los Que Viven En La Arena, Lauren Gonzales

Theses and Dissertations

Graciela Iturbide’s career-defining engagement with indigenous subjects began with a commission by the Mexican government's Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) to document the Seri people. This thesis contextualizes the resulting photobook, Los que viven en la arena (1981), within the history of indigenous representation in Mexico and the controversial policies of the INI.

Developing Mexico: History, Architecture, Photography, And Esther Born’S The New Architecture In Mexico, Tyler Considine

Theses and Dissertations

Esther Born’s The New Architecture in Mexico (1937) presents the first survey of Mexican modern architecture and documents early works by Luis Barragán, Juan O’Gorman, among other Mexican modernists. This thesis examines Born’s architectural photography alongside that of Lola Álvarez Bravo, Guillermo Kahlo, and other photographers and within discourses of modernity, history, and representation.

Pioneers Of Evacuation, Pioneers Of Resettlement: The Photographic Archive Of The Japanese American Incarceration And The Settler Colonial Imaginary, Christina Hobbs

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reexamines the photographic archive of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II produced by the US government, arguing that these images “restage” the evacuation, incarceration, and resettlement periods through a settler colonial “pioneer” mythology, thereby obscuring the precarity of Japanese Americans' racial positionality between “settler” and “native.”

In The Face Of Death The Photographic Reevaluation Of The Death Mask During The Weimar Republic, Maresa Carney

Theses and Dissertations

During the Weimar Republic three books that shared the morbid subject of death masks, were published in short intervals and immediately enjoyed enormous popularity. The three publications Das Ewige Antlitz , Totenmasken, and Das Letzte Gesicht serve as an underpinning of the cultural and philosophical investigation of death mask photography

The Real And The Digital: Female Agency And Resisting The Male Gaze In Lynn Hershman Leeson’S Works, Kelly Chou

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis focuses on three major feminist works by multimedia artist, Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. 1941), that grapple with the construction and potential of female identity. Considering the works within the context of Laura Mulvey’s seminal text “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” this paper will attempt to elucidate how Hershman Leeson’s works have engaged with the male gaze and its social and cultural implications on female identity in visual spheres. This research demonstrates how Hershman Leeson’s efforts to understand the limitations and boundaries for women reflect the same phenomenons observed by Mulvey within “Visual Pleasure.” Rejecting this, Hershman Leeson also …

Art And Environmental Racism In The United States: Through The Works Of Latoya Ruby Frazier, Pope.L, And Mel Chin, Veronika Anna Molnár

Theses and Dissertations

Through the works of LaToya Ruby Frazier, Pope.L, and Mel Chin, this thesis examines the ways in which artists address environmental racism in the United States. Focusing on three locations with majority Black populations and significant toxic hazards, this paper demonstrates artists’ agency to alleviate crises caused by environmental injustice.

Double Documents: Imaging And Installation In Sturtevant’S “Duchamps”, Chris Murtha

Theses and Dissertations

The artist Sturtevant produced exacting but inherently distinct recreations of artworks only recently completed by her contemporaries. This thesis examines the body of work she created after Marcel Duchamp between 1966 and 1973, and how that work reveals the central and entwined roles of photography and installation in her practice.

“Women Of Allah” And “The Book Of Kings:” Shirin Neshat’S Narratives Of Returning Home, Zahra Banyamerian

Dissertations and Theses

Using the framework of nostalgia defined by Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia, this thesis revisited the series “Women of Allah” and “The Book of Kings,” that Shirin Neshat created twenty years apart. It argues that the photographs of both series became the terrain through which Neshat narrates the relationship between her past, present, and future. She constructs her longing for home in “Women of Allah'' and she visualizes her homecoming in “The Book of Kings.” The central point to this research is Neshat’s personal relationship to an event that caused her a traumatic experience, the experience that interrupted …

Traditions And Transformations In The Work Of Adál: Surrealism, El Sainete, And Spanglish, Margarita J. Aguilar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Nuyorican movement was a cultural and intellectual movement beginning in the late 1960s through the 1970s that coincided with the era of civil rights struggle in the United States. The artists, writers, poets, and others in the movement were of Puerto Rican descent and resided in New York neighborhoods such as El barrio or Spanish Harlem, Loisaida or the Lower East Side and the South Bronx. The term “Nuyorican” was embraced as a badge of honor and pride by New York’s Puerto Rican community. It was during this time that cultural-specific institutions such El Museo del Barrio, Taller Boricua, …

The Harlem Book Of The Dead: Pan-Africanism, Funerary Portraiture, And The African-American Way Of Death, Jessica D. Feldman

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the text and images contained in James Van Der Zee and Camille Billops’s seminal photobook The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978). The title, frontispiece, and introduction, combined with Van Der Zee’s funerary portraits, illuminate the connection between African-American rituals of death and Pan-Africanism. While these two concepts appear to be distinct, they are both predicated upon and intrinsically linked to key values in African American culture, including liberation and the meaning of community. Each chapter focuses on a different contextual framework for situating The Harlem Book of the Dead within the historical and political moment …

Tactics For Thriving On Multiplicity: Liliana Porter’S Photo-Drawing-Installations, 1973–Present, Jennifer Bratovich

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Porter’s hybrid 1973 works during a period of transnational artistic mobility. It argues she employed strategies of reproduction and contingency to circulate the works among multiple contexts, and shows how her 2012 revisiting of these works led to their revitalization within current reassessments of Latin American conceptualism.

Seen And Unseen: Visualizing Contradictions In Postwar Japan, 1950s–1960s, Christina Lai

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis offers a comparative study on how photography visualizes the political dynamics, ideological and psychological contradictions in postwar Japan. The discussion includes the exhibition The Family of Man in Tokyo (1956), Werner Bischof and Robert Capa’s photographs of Japan, and local photographers Ken Domon and Shomei Tomatsu.

Framing The City: Photography And The Construction Of São Paulo, 1930–1955, Danielle J. Stewart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Between 1930 and 1955 São Paulo, Brazil experienced a period of accelerated growth as the population nearly quadrupled from 550,000 to two million. In response, the municipal government undertook an aggressive public works program and commercial building boomed. Photographic representations of the cityscape were essential in directing modern São Paulo’s physical evolution because they reflected both the real—a chaotically growing megacity—and the ideal—a literally new, modernized space. This dissertation centers on four case studies of artists practicing different photographic modalities in order to analyze the symbiotic relationship between São Paulo's urban development and its photographic representation.

Construction sites, scaffolding, and …

Access Point: Yuan Dongping’S Mental Patients In China And The State Of Chinese Documentary Photography In The 1990s, Sheung Ng

Theses and Dissertations

An investigation of the biographical, political, art historical, and social factors that could affect the discrepancy between the intention and reception of Chinese photographer Yuan Dongping’s Mental Patients in China photobook published in 1996, providing insight into the state of Chinese documentary photography publishing in the 1990s.

Modernizing The Arthurian Legend: Julia Margaret Cameron’S Photographic Illustrations Of Idylls Of The King, Hannah Rozenblat

Theses and Dissertations

This study identifies Julia Margaret Cameron’s contribution to the Arthurian Revival through Illustrations to the Idylls of the King and Other Poems, taking into consideration the development of narrative photography, the depiction of Arthurian themes in art and book illustration, theatricality and its connection to photography, and Victorian gender roles.

Writing With Light: Cameraless Photography And Its Narrative In The 1920s, Karen K. Barber

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cameraless photography’s resurgence in the 1920s has long been discussed by art historians and critics as either a facet of modernist “new photography,” or as a specialized practice associated with prominent figures of the interwar avant-garde. In their discussions of the medium, scholars have aligned cameraless photography with specific movements, groups, schools, or individuals, as a means of situating its emergence and subsequent popularity in the 1920s. This dissertation broadens the understanding of cameraless photography (also referred to as photograms) and its narrative by shifting the focus to the publications responsible for the medium’s articulation and dissemination in the years …

“After-Ozymandias”: The Colonization Of Symbols And The American Monument, H. R. Membreno-Canales

Theses and Dissertations

After-Ozymandias examines the visual rhetoric of American patriotism through its many symbols, including flags and monuments. My thesis project consists of photographs of empty plinths, objects, products and archival materials. Countless relics remain today memorializing leaders and empires that inevitably declined, from antiquity to modern times. Looking back at distant history feels like a luxury, though: the question for our time in America is whether we have the strength of mind as a society to scrutinize our history, warts and all.

Contesting Representations Of Gender And Womanhood In Mexico The Photomontages Of Lola Álvarez Bravo, 1935–1958, Alana Hernandez

Theses and Dissertations

Lola Álvarez Bravo (1903–1993), a Mexican photographer, photojournalist, portraitist, and teacher created approximately thirty photomontages during the span of her fifty-year career. This thesis argues that Álvarez Bravo turned to photomontage during targeted periods of her career in order to contest and challenge prevailing discourses on motherhood and femininity. A close analysis of eight photomontages produced between 1935 to the last printed in 1958 make evident the manifold ways Álvarez Bravo represented gender as a contested, political, and personal concern.

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.

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 …

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).

Leonard Freed's Black In White America, Jennifer Cherry Wilkinson

Theses and Dissertations

Through a dynamic range of photographs and texts from the 1960s, Leonard Freed’s Black in White America is an exceptional artwork that both illustrates the numerous ways the photo book format creates meaning and provides an alternate history of the Civil Rights movement and the lives of those impacted by it.

Transparent Interiors: Detective And Mystery Fiction In The Age Of Photography, Melissa D. Dunn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a meditation on the mutable boundaries that define interior life in the age of photography. I probe these boundaries through selected readings in two literary genres that share conceptual links with photography—detective fiction and mystery fiction. Photography plays an important role in a radical reconsideration of the boundaries between public and private, engaging two dominant and often conflicting cultural values that shape American life at the turn of the twentieth century—the mandate to define and protect privacy and the simultaneous call for greater transparency in public and personal life. Photography, through its perceived transgressions against private life, …

The Photographic Universe: Vilém Flusser’S Theories Of Photography, Media, And Digital Culture, Martha Schwendener

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite accelerated changes in the way we create, view, and experience photographs, critics and scholars in North America continue to read and assign an accepted canon of photography theory, often predicated on old concepts and technologies. This dissertation seeks to remedy that situation. It focuses on the work of Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920-1991), author of such books as Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985), and Does Writing Have a Future? (1987), which develop a theory of technical images that reaches beyond photography to include film, television, video, computer, and satellite images. Rather …

Bridging Modernities In Brazil: Progress And Violence In The Work Of Rosangela Renno, Francine Kath

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.