Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Who's Behind The Lens? Exploring Artistic Voice And Identity In Portrait Photography, Emily Menk

Summer Research

What methods do photographers use to insert their creative voice into photography, and how do these methods affect aesthetic qualities and viewer’s interpretation of the final product? This was a prominent question I sought to answer in hopes of utilizing the results within my own art. Intrigued by the cultural concept of photography’s ability to “capture a moment” versus the methodical, perhaps even mechanical nature of commercial photography, my research led me to explore how “captured moments” could be artificially manufactured, and in turn to explore how commercial photos can be captured from a serendipitous moment.

My focus on portraiture …

Finding The Intrepid, Eve Swords Alpert

Senior Projects Spring 2013

Finding the Intrepid

Presented here are territories designed for leisure and enjoyment, the transient occupants thereof, and my attempts to understand what draws the two together. From a certain distance, recreational areas appear to take on religious connotations. Disney World, the Lincoln Memorial, and Niagara Falls are sites of pilgrimage for millions every year. Travelers hope to transcend the everyday. In a world of uncertainties, where one is alternately plagued by rapid changes and dreary repetition, pilgrimages offer a glimpse of the eternal.

A tear shed at a boy-band concert resembles a divine encounter. Coins dropped into the Lost River …

Land Of The Ley, Grace Huddleston

Auctus: The Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Scholarship

The line separating phenomenon and science has become blurred in the investigation of ley lines. Ley lines can be described as “invisible” lines that link different places of interest and significance, either historical or geographical. This is a very loose definition, but it must remain vague, as it has to account for the various understandings of the lines. These individual interpretations are noted by Atkins Webster in his introduction to “Do Quasar Ley Lines Really Exist,” in which he states that “one supposition is that these ley lines were intended for some practical purpose, perhaps to mark a track or …

The Bridge, Volume 10, 2013, Bridgewater State University

the bridge

Volume 10 Staff
Ryan Dipetta, Editor-in-chief, Literature
Alexa Noé, Editor-in-chief, Art & Design
Kacy Blais
Meaghan Casey
Gabriella Diniz
Brett French
Andrew Laverty
Jessica Melendy
William Regan
Lee Anne Wentzell
Kate Camerlin, Consultant
Caytlin Buckle, Consultant

Melanie Joy McNaughton, Faculty Advisor
John Mulrooney, Faculty Advisor

Value Perspective: A Necessary Condition For Photographic Art, Michelle Marie Burdine

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The conjoined relationship photography has with technology complicates conversations about photography as art because this relationship allows photography to be used interchangeably for practical, social, and commercial purposes, as well as for art. A theory of art for photography is needed in order to accurately separate photographic art from vernacular photography. I show that photography has a unique relationship with technology, which has served to promote the rapid democratization of photography, and that the photographic arts have been treated differently from the greater fine arts. This is especially evident when photographic portraiture is compared with painted portraiture. I offer my …

The Creation Of "Trash The Dress" : A Solo Play, Kristina Sutton

LSU Master's Theses

The thesis project called for the MFA candidate to create a one-person show of originality and entertainment between 25 minutes and 45 minutes in length. This thesis, submitted to the Graduate School of Louisiana State University as partial requirement for graduation with the Master of Fine Arts degree in Theatre, follows the creation of a solo performance piece by Kristina Sutton, called “Trash the Dress.” The thesis includes inspiration for creating this solo performance piece, initial correspondence between the MFA candidate and consultants, research material and a copy of the script, personal reflection on writing and rehearsal challenges, photos from …

Photography And The Paradigm Of The Trace, Daniel Nevin

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The idea that photographs can be explained as traces made by the things they depict has been a recurring paradigm in theories about the nature of the photographic medium. Walter Benjamin, Charles Sanders Peirce, Susan Sontag, Andre Bazin and Roland Barthes are a few of the many theorists who have used the paradigm of the trace to explain the nature of photographs. The paradigm can also be argued to have been a significant influence in the work of prominent artists such as Gerhard Richter, Adam Fuss and Cornelia Parker whose work has explored the photographic medium. Through an exegesis and …

Your Loss, Lauren Jean Hegge

LSU Master's Theses

Your Loss is an exhibition of drawings, photographs, intaglio prints, found objects and prose. Drawn from personal and anonymous archives, the works in the exhibition acknowledge various forms of breakdown, exploring individual reactions and attempts to rebuild from the fragments of loss. Inherent in the work are discussions of remembering and forgetting, finding and losing, building and destroying, growth and decay. This work is both recognition of the desire to hold on too tightly and an effort to learn to let go.

The Storyteller: Observations On Murtada Bulbul’S ‘Swineherders’, Sharon Sliwinski

Sharon Sliwinski

New York Transfixed: Notes On The Expression Of Fear, Sharon Sliwinski

Sharon Sliwinski

Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image, Gavin W. Keeney

Gavin W Keeney

Dossier Chris Marker is a study of a late-modern chiasmus, impersonal-personal agency, as it comes to expression in the works of French artist and filmmaker Chris Marker as the dynamic interplay of political and subjective agency. As chiasmus, the complementary halves of this often-apocalyptic dynamis (a semi-catastrophic, temporal or historical force-field) also – arguably – secretly agree to meet, through the work of art, in the futural. Consistent with the classical figure of concordia discors, these irreducible warring aspects of life experience are, in fact, resolved in an atemporal and ahistorical moment that inhabits the work of art from its …

Evoking A Memory Of The Future In Foer's Everything Is Illuminated, Doro Wiese

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Evoking a Memory of the Future in Foer's Everything is Illuminated" Doro Wiese discusses Jonathan Safran Foer's novel. In the text a photograph plays a decisive role: the image of two young people drives the Jewish American Jonathan to visit the Ukraine. The photograph is presumably of Jonathan's grandfather Safran and a woman named Augustine who saved Safran's life during a nazi raid of his village: the photograph becomes an ekphrasis, a description of a visual work of art in another medium which transforms the generic characteristics of written and photographic representations. According to Anselm …

Family Of Man, Robert Knight

Articles

Exhibition review of photographer Taryn Simon's project A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII, exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art from May 2 - September 3, 2012.

Memory Traces 2012 : Hong Kong, Department Of Visual Studies, Lingnan University

Visual Studies Programme : Students’ Monographs

Memory Traces is a photography book project which comprises a collection of images created by students of Jack Picone during a studio practice class at Lingnan University. The collective body of work is an exploration of a wide array of themes based on each student's own personal interests.

Gear And Advise By Jennifer Smith-Mayo, Jennifer Smith-Mayo

Center on Aging : Boomer Reporting Corps

Jennifer Smith-Mayo, award-winning, free-lance photographer, videographer, multimedia artist, and instructor, discusses the gear she uses in her work and gives advise on how to choose a camera.

Jennifer collaborated with her husband, writer Matthew P. Mayo, on a series of popular hardcover books (Maine Icons, New Hampshire Icons, and Vermont Icons).

Why The "Harvest Of Death" Doesn't Matter (And Why It Does), John M. Rudy

Interpreting the Civil War: Connecting the Civil War to the American Public

I went on a tour a few Sundays ago. It was very tough to explain exactly what I had done (in sensible terms) with my coworkers when I came into the office the next Monday morning. Not just very tough, but embarrassingly tough.

THEM: "What did you do this weekend, John?"

ME: "Well, Sunday I went on a tour of places on the Gettysburg battlefield where one specific photo wasn't taken-"

THEM: *blank stare* [excerpt]

Photography Whatever We Want It To Be, Jyl A. Kelley

Mid-America College Art Association Conference 2012 Digital Publications

Contemporary photography has evolved from an orphaned art into a mainstay for global imaging culture. Today anyone can make a picture or image, manipulate it, montage it, and publish it on the Internet. Photographic art practice will always answer back to its history but more importantly and inherent in its digital form and distribution, photographic art is responding to the modern ubiquity of the digital image and digital age.

Snapshots, Clichés And Simulacra, Millee Tibbs

Mid-America College Art Association Conference 2012 Digital Publications

In his essay “Photography,” Kracauer critiques the abundance of photographic images in illustrated newspapers stating, “The blizzard of photographs betrays an indifference toward what the things mean.”[i] Current digital imaging technologies have turned this blizzard into a complete whiteout. Never before have people had such access to image-making technologies and the ease with which the images are now disseminated. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the snapshot has evolved little and remains a visual cliché - a banal vessel of personal sentimentality.

In this paper I will discuss the use and fetishization of snapshot images in both my …

Dreaming In Analog: The Marriage Of Vintage Photographic Process And The Contemporary World., Lynn M. Lee

Mid-America College Art Association Conference 2012 Digital Publications

"Dreaming in Analog: the marriage of vintage photographic process and the contemporary world" discusses a choice in the photographic arts. That choice is, by many contemporary artists, to take a step back. Slow down. Revisit analog photography as it was originally used. However, because of the fast-paced world in which we live, even these slow, lovely processes are able to be created, completed and shared globally via digital technology and the Internet.

Preconciousness, Michael James Ripp

All Student Theses

Preconsciousness ... Explores the topographical model of the mind through the deconstruction of accepted realities. Blurring the boundaries of consciousness and unconsciousness. Embracing and accepting the abstract view of the mind as “realms” independent of each other. Surreal, yet familiar spaces and environments become a gateway to the preconscious and a deeper awareness. These unique spaces become a catalyst for a physiological journey to the unconscious. Complex views and interpretations of oneself and ones experiences come to the surface. Engaging memories and emotions such as anxiety ... joy… tranquility………manifesting as physical space as spaces become representations of unconscious. Minds are …

Dichotomy Of Self, Shelly Hokanson

All Student Theses

This body of work explores, through a character named Doll, the impressions, emotions, and realizations I have experienced while undergoing a transformation of self, both inside and out. This collection of images also explores the dichotomy of solitude vs. companionship. (Abstract by OPUS staff from author text)

All That I Am Or Hope To Be, I Owe To My Angel, My Mother, Pamela Planera

All Student Theses

All that I am or hope to be, I owe to my angel, my mother. A quote that binds the relationship my mother and I will always have, through life, death and the paths I choose for my future to fulfill a promise. A promise I intend to keep and fulfill until we meet again… on the other side…

All dilapidated architectural buildings of my series are considered symbolic spaces. They become tangible - representing a venue of dreams where we become deeply affected, by our behavior, our environment, our society and ourselves. Each venue spawned an identity - it’s …

In The Language Of Pictures: How Copyright Law Fails To Adequately Account For Photography, Teresa M. Bruce

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Not Just A Symbol But A Status Symbol, Summer D. Winston

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

I create art, not out of a deep understanding of the world around me, but out of a lack of one. Human psychology, motives, behaviors, stressors, intentions and identity are the themes that boggle me the most. Therefore, it is only natural that my work would be fueled by the questions these themes pose. In the past I sought to understand what pushes people to make certain choices and how can the world around us affect the formation of identity. Currently I wonder about identity in terms of what do people use to form and reinforce identity both real and …

Inspired Living, Gongke Li

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Inspired Living is a juxtaposition of old and new, contemplating the shift of values in contemporary China.

Patriotism used to be one of the key values in the Chinese people's minds, but those values have changed dramatically. Fewer people are thinking about or talking about patriotism, like sacrificing for the country or serving the people. In reality, getting rich and spending money to purchase all kinds of products, either absolute necessities or unnecessary luxuries, has become the key value of many Chinese people.

The images used in this project are all found and come from various sources, including books and …

Paper Towns: Sense Of Place In Industrial, Small-Town New England, 1869-1927, David William Deacon

History - Dissertations

After the Civil War, new technologies and business structures transformed the American economy and society. One area that has received much attention in the antebellum period but much less after the Civil War, is small town New England. In the late 1860s, the introduction of wood pulp paper technology transformed formerly small market and manufacturing communities into centers of heavy industry. This dissertation is a study of this transformation. It focuses on three communities: Bellows Falls, Vermont, Franklin, New Hampshire, and Turners Falls, Massachusetts.

This study examines four broad areas: the historical background of the towns, and townspeople's awareness of …

Invisible Cities: Photographic Fictions Of Architecture, Maria Levitsky

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The artist's process in which she examines the built environment through the medium of black and white photography. By tracing the trajectory of her awareness of architecture from her early career as a dancer, to the making of photographic images, the artist illuminates the process of deconstructing architectural and pictorial space into fragmented yet illusionistically convincing photographic montages. Influenced by the urban localities in which she dwells, she tells the story of being captivated by the post-industrial landscape of Williamsburg, Brookyn, NY, followed by landing in New Orleans and her fascination with post-Katrina architecture. Grounded in the analog techniques of …

Freedom Of Interpretation, Georgi Ivanov

Theses and Dissertations

The photographic series Ideal Cities that I started in 2011 is inspired by the conflict between my idea of the “west” and my evolving experience in the United States. What struck me was the popularity of what I see as model experience – a spatial experience controlled by the Spectacle. In the terms of the Situationist International and its most prominent figure Guy Debord, the Spectacle is the collapse of reality into the streams of images, products and activities sanctioned by centralized monopolist business or state bureaucracy. Thus, personal experience is replaced with preconceived notions, which control the way people …

I Am Who Am, Ali M. Scattergood

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This body of work includes both black and white photographs and a film. In each work, I put my collaborators in an environment consisting of a simple black curtain, to neutralize the space, and a 2 foot by 2 foot glowing orb of light. I asked my subjects to interact with the glowing orb in any way they felt most comfortable. I adjusted my collaborators only to keep them from leaving the frame of my camera. The positions and movements these people produced are both intimate and authentic to themselves. As such, each experience with the orb, captured on film, …

Self / Center, Jason J. Anderson

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The act of photographing myself has had a profound effect on my personal healing after surviving a suicide attempt in the winter of 2008. Coming to the end of my rope after years of trying ex-gay therapy and countless bullying in the workplace and from others left me with a fragmented self that was collapsing. It was through the reawakening and rebuilding of myself that I began to photograph myself as a means of therapy and closure. My work has consistently dealt with the elements of faith and sexuality and the problems that one goes through in attempting to reconcile …