Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"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

Subverting The Selfie: Analysis Of Cindy Sherman’S Instagram Photos And Untitled Film Stills, Katrina M. Russell

Theses and Dissertations

As a prominent artist of self-portraiture, Cindy Sherman has been captivating audiences and scholars for decades. Recently, some media outlets have begun generalizing all of Sherman's work under the selfie concept using her dual role as model and photographer as the defining factor along with her recent activity on Instagram. In this paper, I argue that characterizing all of Sherman's work as selfies is problematic and inaccurate while illustrating similar themes present in her early Untitled Film Stills series and more recent Instagram photos. First, I start by outlining the fundamental criteria for characterizing a photo as a selfie using …

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.

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.

Martian Mother, Elizabeth Mcgrady

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the relationship between humans and land, through the lens of the scientific and religious, bridging the physical realm with the spiritual. It acts as accompanying material to the project titled Martian Mother, supplementary information to the visual work, and an extension of the proposal, the center of the work. The proposal exists to send myself, or a like-minded individual, to Mars with artificial insemination equipment to give birth to the first Martian, becoming the first Martian Mother. This work is rooted firmly in speculative fiction, creating a nonlinear future framework for a new society and space exploration.

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.

Everything We Touch Is Touching Us, Molly Markow

Theses and Dissertations

EVERYTHING WE TOUCH IS TOUCHING US

MOLLY MARKOW

22 Pages

Images shape both personal and collective experiences of place in the Anthropocene. I am interested in the relationship of landscape and representation to purity politics, longing, and escape. I am critical of the role of idealized depictions of “nature” and question how images shape our notions of paradise, desire, and fantasy. Who benefits from notions of paradise, and who doesn’t? I ask these questions while searching for a way to embrace impurity and the beauty in contamination. How might we come to an understanding of the post-pure that leaves room …

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.

The Wild Beasts, Peter Cochrane

Theses and Dissertations

The Wild Beasts springs from my desire to thank my ever-expanding queer chosen family and mentors for their strength. Working through the often violent and othering aspects of the lens and photographic histories I create floral portraits responding to each person’s being and our relationship. Using the 19th century, 8x10 large format view camera—the same used by colonialists and ethnographers to “capture” the divinity of Nature—I erect each as a traditional still life studio setup at the threshold between the natural world and that constructed by humans. These environments speak both to the character of each friend and also to …

“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.

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.

Tara Bogart: Modern Hair Studies, Kathleen Tousignant

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

TARA BOGART: MODERN HAIR STUDIES

by

Kathleen Tousignant

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2016

Under the Supervision of Professor Jennifer Johung

This exhibition and accompanying catalogue explore Tara Bogart’s modern hair study photographs. Compiled of 28 photographs from 3 different series, Modern Hair Studies examines the correlation between hair and identity. The faceless portraits from her series A Modern Hair Study and Un Capillaire Modern Etude showcase the ways in which millennial women use hair colors, hairstyles, and body art as a form of self-expression. When viewed as a group, the portraits serve as a visual and demographic representation of …