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History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology

Washington University in St. Louis

Photography

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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Painting Ephemera In The Age Of Mass Production: American Trompe L’Oeil Painting And Visual Culture In The Late Nineteenth Century, Katherine Brunk Harnish Aug 2019

Painting Ephemera In The Age Of Mass Production: American Trompe L’Oeil Painting And Visual Culture In The Late Nineteenth Century, Katherine Brunk Harnish

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study offers a fresh approach to investigating the modernization of visual media, exploring themes of media translation, appropriation, and the fine art and popular art divide. This dissertation focuses on paintings that represent prints and photographs in order to understand the relationships between all three media—relationships that changed drastically in late nineteenth-century America. William Harnett, John Haberle, and John Peto made many trompe l’oeil paintings that depict photographs, newspaper clippings, trade cards, and other ephemera. This project posits that these artists represented new media strategically to attract viewers well versed in these forms and to assert the continued relevance …


A Document That Transcends Itself: Between Abstraction And Reality, Seth Lewis May 2018

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 …


Observance: A Record Of Experiments, Olivia L. Mosley Jul 2014

Observance: A Record Of Experiments, Olivia L. Mosley

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

Thesis writing on the work of Olivia Mosley, Bachelor of Fine Arts candidate in Printmaking at Washington University in St. Louis. Engaging with a diverse history of photography and observation through the theoretical writings of Barthes, Berger, Didi-Huberman and others, Mosley conducts a series of visual experiments as part of her art practice in an attempt to expand her visual knowledge. Exploring the concepts of visualization, observation and the role technology plays in both of the aforementioned activities, Mosley’s work is discussed alongside the visual contributions of scientists, artists and hobbyists experimenting with the photographic medium throughout history, including, Wilhelm …


Something Gained: Translation As Process, Amanda V. Rothschild May 2014

Something Gained: Translation As Process, Amanda V. Rothschild

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

This statement examines translation as a way to explore the act of painting. Drawing from theories of literary translation as discussed by Walter Benjamin, this essay looks at the ways in which the process of translating an image from a photograph into a painting echoes many ideas that come from the approach of translating between languages. The theme of translation is discussed first through an examination of the role of the photograph in determining the content of the paintings, using Gerhard Richter as a reference. The role of material and the physicality of paint in the translation of a space …