Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 …

Francis Bedford, 1816-1894: English Landscape Photographer Of The Wet-Plate Period, Bill Jay

Art & Art History ETDs

This dissertation examines Francis Bedford's ancestry, his early careers in architecture and lithography, and the growth of his reputation as a landscape and architectural photographer; it explores his photographic techniques and concepts, reflected in the views of exhibition notices and society discussions; it reviews Bedford's photographs in the form of single prints, cartes-de-visite, stereographs and tipped-in book illustrations; it describes the circumstances and achievements of his Royal tour; it traces his influence through the work of his son, William, and his other known associates.

American Family Memorial Imagery, The Photograph, And The Search For Immortality, Daniel Gyger Snyder

Art & Art History ETDs

In this dissertation I trace the development of family (as opposed to public) memorial imagery and note the unique contribution of photography. I examine attitudes toward photography during its early years. These attitudes reveal that the medium was uniquely appropriate for the continuation and extension of the tradition of memorial imagery in America.

I suggest that America holds expectations for the Machine and for the power of Science that have at various times (the mid-nineteenth century and today) led some to assume that death is not inevitable and that physical Immortality is possible. From Puritan times, when death was accepted, …