Photography Commons^™

Reframing Kabyle Resistance In Marc Garanger's Femmes Algériennes 1960, Lea Wong

Journal of Amazigh Studies

This article examines the identity photographs taken by Marc Garanger as a site of Kabyle women’s resistance in the Algerian War. Over the course of 1960, Garanger moved between various wartime displacement camps across Kabylia, photographing indigenous people for the production of identity cards––a crucial from of colonial population control. Since its publication, Garanger’s Femmes algériennes has become an ambiguous symbol of resistance in the Algerian War, largely due to the subjects’ perceived antagonistic posture and gaze. This article takes a forensic approach to analyzing Kabyle women’s wartime adornment, uncovering a new framework for conceptualizing Algerian women’s agency grounded in …

Roaming Pixels: Clipping The Operative Close-Up, Vanessa Gravenor

Artl@s Bulletin

Abstract: This essay examines the disseminated war image as it takes off at the speed of light. It seeks to challenge the legacy of the post-structuralist spectator who watches war by complicating this figure with post-colonial perspectives where the distanced, global war dissemination collapses into the intimate, subjective gaze. Focusing on artist–theorist perspectives, it traces strategies for working with the digital broadcast of war, specifically from the 2000s and 2010s, and artists who peer into uncertain pixels and the cruelty of the close-up.

Zusammenfassung: In diesem Essay wird das verbreitete Kriegsbild untersucht, das mit Lichtgeschwindigkeit abhebt. Er versucht, das Erbe …

Enduring The American Dream, Edward Grattan

Capstones

Martha and Rene - both Colombian nationals – have made the difficult decision to self-deport from the United States in the midst of the Trump Administration’s unprecedented immigration crackdown and deportation campaign. After working as day laborers in The Hamptons, New York for nearly eight years, the couple shares their experience of leaving their current life behind as anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy escalates across the country.

The Trump administration has transformed the landscape for immigrants living in the United States, regardless of documentation status, by eliminating paths for legal residency, charging The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency with …

Jotographía // Fagtography: On Amor Propio Radical // Radical Self-Love, Jonathan Erick Guzman

Masters Theses

“Jotographía // Fagtography: On Amor Propio Radical // Radical Self-Love” is an interdisciplinary thesis that explores the intersections of queer Chicanx identity, photography, and performance as technologies of survival and self-construction. I construct a speculative archive of Chicanx queer experience through my tripartite personas: Barbí, Luke, and myself—collectively, the Guzman Triplets.

Through these embodied avatars, I embrace rasquachismo, camp, Catholic iconography, and hybrid photographic processes—including Polaroids, AI-manipulated imagery, anthotypes, and installation—to investigate visibility, fragmentation, and ancestral memory. Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa’s frameworks of la herida abierta and nepantla, José Esteban Muñoz’s concepts of disidentification and queer futurity, and bell …

Pedro Aceves Mfa Thesis, Pedro M. Aceves

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My Work is about looking at Cruising through a queer decolonial lens. Using multiple mediums such as photo, glass, Augmented reality, and film, I explore these queer histories and aesthetics through not just an anthropological approach but also an artistic epistemological approach weaving together narratives of prehispanic and modern queer Latinidad.

Southern Rambles: Seeking A Place, Finding A Self, John Hayes

Study the South

"So, we set out from Atlanta in August 1997 on the older US Highway 19, heading south. We were seeking a South and we didn’t have a consciousness of being southern, but in a very elemental way, our consciousness had been deeply shaped by forces we were unaware of."

Arenas Of Resistance: How Oklahoma's Black Rodeos Preserved Environmental Wisdom And Community Power, Rorie Johnson

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores how Black rodeos in Oklahoma emerged from post-emancipation agricultural labor and ranching traditions, serving as powerful sites of cultural preservation, knowledge transmission, and resistance to dominant narratives of the American West. Through analysis of historical records, photographic evidence, and personal family narratives, this research demonstrates how Black Oklahomans developed unique relationships with land and animals that encompassed both the "ecological burden" of agricultural labor and the "beauty" of cultural expression and community-building. Drawing on theoretical frameworks including Kimberly Ruffin's "ecological burden-and-beauty paradox," George Lipsitz's "Black spatial imaginaries," bell hooks' "oppositional gaze," and Toni Morrison's concept of "rememory," …

Huchum: The Legacy Of Fire Suppression, Indigenous Land Management, And Media Representation, Carolyn Coyne

Pomona Senior Theses

In my thesis, I examine how various forms of news media from the 1900s to present day in Ohlone territory have framed a particular hegemonic ideology around fire that matches early colonial journal entries – an ideology that is fueled by fear, sensationalism, and exclusion and directly commits violence against the Ohlone people. I investigate this time period because this is when modern news corporations, like The New York Times, rose into prominence. Specifically, I question how media representations of fire inform regulations over controlled burns; what are the similarities in discourse between media framing and policy? What tactics are …

Ua12/2/2 Talisman: Legacy, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Administration Documents

Fall 2024 Talisman:

• Our Mission
• Harrington, Ragan & Cecilia Alali. Legacy
• Muscutt, Carson. The Spirit of Western – Big Red
• Hardesty, Emma. Beyond the Letters – Fraternities & Sororities
• Lein, Samantha. The Iceberg Beneath You – Poem
• Pollard, Evynn. Echoes of the Past – Jonesville
• Sutton, Avery. Tasting Tradition – Recipes
• Phelps, Brett. The Hill
• Colovos, Christina. Pale Blue Dot – Poem
• Rainwater, Riley & Carson Muscutt. Marking Time – Marching Band
• Vickers, Abigail. Grassroots – Political Campaigns
• Muscutt, Carson. Horoscopes
• Legacy Issue 17 Playlist
• Lasting Impact

Going Beyond The Margins: Photographs By Ming Smith, Isis A. Serna

Art & Art History ETDs

Ming Smith is a photographer who has been creating images since the early 1970s and trained with the artist collective Kamoinge Workshop. Throughout most of her career, Smith has been marginalized by art historians, critics, and museum curators. Since the early 2000s, Smith has only been included in museum exhibitions highlighting African-American female artists from 1960 to the present. Before this surge of interest in her work, the art world ignored and silenced her. However, Smith’s creative process allowed her to see and experience going beyond the struggle by being consistent in her strategy to do what she wanted on …

With Love, ; An Interdisciplinary And Intersectional Look At Why Creativity Is Essential, Theo Starr Gardner

Whittier Scholars Program

My Whittier Scholars Program self-designed major, Teaching Creativity, is a mixture of Art, Literature, and Education classes. My research and praxis classes have been focused on the ‘how?’s and 'why?’s of creativity, so it felt only right that my project should be a constructivist, generative project. The project I have been working on throughout my time at Whittier, and that has just fully come to fruition on April 11th, 2024, was a solo art gallery/open mic event entitled ‘With Love,’. With Love, was conceptually inspired by the research I’ve conducted on creativity and creative arts education over the past few …

The Contributions Of Nuevomexicanas To New Mexico Lowrider Culture, Traditions, And Rituals: The Significance Of Young Chicana Cultural Pachuca And Chola Aesthetics And Identity Expression In The Albuquerque Lowrider Community, Valerie J. Chavez

Chicana and Chicano Studies ETDs

The lowrider community in Albuquerque creates a space for families and individuals to gather and express themselves within Chicana/o/x culture. Nuevomexicanas have played a significant role in the teaching and preservation of the New Mexican traditions and rituals of lowriding. This research project is a visual and plática-based study. It explores how young Nuevomexicanas express their Chicana identity through la pachuca and chola cultural aesthetics and identity while actively participating in lowrider culture. This project utilizes the research methods of la resolana, querencia, and plática to understand, discover, and document the roles of young Nuevomexicanas in the Albuquerque …

Interpersonal Activism: How Local Black Residents Shaped The University Of Mississippi And Oxford In The Mid-Twentieth Century, Anna F. Kaplan

Study the South

"It is difficult to measure the direct impact—and sometimes even the existence—of daily personal interactions on individuals’ thoughts about race and desegregation. Rather than attempting to parse between change stemming from interpersonal relationships versus change as a result of federal intervention, I examine interracial and intraracial interactions across the town/gown divide in Oxford as spheres of influence. Black challenges to White supremacy at UM brought systemic racism into question even though those systems of oppression remained in place."

Ua1c11/122 Wku Panhellenic Council Photo Collection, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Photographs removed from Panhellenic Council scrapbooks.

Melissa Brown Collection Of "A Loud Absence" Project Materials, Zach S. Henderson Library, Special Collections

Finding Aids

This collection consists of photographs and digital files created by artist Melissa Brown as part of her project, titled "A Loud Absence." According to the artist, the project sought to discover what happens to a space after great injustice has been committed in it. The project examines whether a community's choice of what to do with such an area reflects healing or reveals that they have not moved forward from their past.

Ua1c11/127 Stephen Flora Photo Collection, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Photographs donated by WKU alumnus Stephen Flora, taken for class and College Heights Herald.

Describing Dictee, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

The visual images in Dictee are famously captionless. They resist straightforward explanation. In writing image descriptions of the images in Dictee, I have tried to preserve the "captionlessness" of the original. The point here is not to explain the pictures—an image description is not identical to a caption—but to make Dictee more accessible to readers who are blind and visually impaired. I realize, of course, that in trying to make Dictee's captionless images more "legible," I have inevitably "mistranslated" Dictee as it was originally designed to be experienced. Its captionlessness is lost in translation despite my efforts to preserve it. …

Digitizing The Photographs Of Black Photographers Horace And Evelyn Stewart, 1897-1978, S. Victor Fleischer

University Research

The purpose of this two-year project is to digitize and make available online for research and discovery the photographs of Horace and Evelyn Stewart from The University of Akron Archives & Special Collections. The Stewarts were a husband-and-wife team of professional Black photographers who owned and operated Stewart’s Photo Studio in Akron, Ohio. Their photographs visually document the rich history of the Black community in Akron, northeast Ohio, and beyond, from 1897 to 1978. The collection consists of 37 boxes containing approximately 46,000 historic black and white and color photographic prints and negatives that capture Black personalities and families; religious, …

Call For Me When You Get There: I'Ll Be Among The Crows, Jessica O. Tifase

Theses and Dissertations

I've always been intrigued by the ways in which the notion of flight has been used to describe the movement of Black people, both literally and figuratively. In many instances, flight performs as a double entendre, embodying multiple meanings: to escape or to transcend. The fluidity of its definition prompts a reflection I’ve been wrestling with as I move through the world: Are Black people in a perpetual state of flight?

In my thesis exhibition, Call for Me When You Get There, I use the precarious state of flight as a means to explore the complicated choreography necessary for navigating …

Mercy Buckets: Country Music, Southern Fiction, And The Limits Of Rewriting The South, Andy Oler

Study the South

"During World War II, GIs began saying “mercy buckets” as an intentional, joking mispronunciation of the French “merci beaucoup.”1 In the 2011 song “Mercy Buckets,” the southern rock and alt-country band Drive-By Truckers rewrite the phrase’s origin by treating it as an idiom of the American South. As might be expected, however, DBT do not reinforce stereotypical notions of the ignorant southern redneck. Instead, songwriter and lead singer Patterson Hood takes the phrase seriously, explaining just what it would mean if bringing someone “buckets of mercy” were a recognized part of southern culture. . . . In this article, I …

'I Don’T Fit That Stereotype': Participant Photography And The Visual (Re)Positioning Of Black Men, Quaylan Allen

Education Faculty Articles and Research

This paper examines how Black men use a participant photography project as a tool for meaning making during the current political and social context of anti-Black racism, Black activism, and intersectional politics. Using a critical visual methodology in the analysis of the images, this paper will examine how Black men make meaning of current social issues through the types of images they produced, how they make meaning of the types of audiences they are speaking to through the project, and how these meanings are reflected through their repositioning practices in the visual project. Specific attention is paid to how they …

Ni De Aqui Ni De Alla..., Jc Santistevan

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Ni de aqui ni de alla navigates the complexities of belonging to two cultures-Mexican

and American-while not fully identifying with either. By visualizing liminal spaces,

migratory patterns, and quotidian subject matter the work serves as a metaphor for

the Latinx experience in the United States-an experience defined by conflicts between

conformity and resistance, individuality and community, spirituality and secularism,

alienation and belonging. "Black and white are the colors of photography…..they

symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair," Robert Frank once said, and it is

through a nonlinear installation of black and white imagery that I seek to describe the

push …

The Landscape Does Not Care It Is A Landscape: A Utopian Pessimist Journey In Kentucky., Shachaf Polakow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

These thesis and exhibition, invite the viewers to travel through different places in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The region’s landscape, like many other American landscapes, is often known to the public through the settler colonial lens—a lens that ignores Indigenous peoples’ history in the region. The work in the exhibition is a response to landscape art's history and its complicity with American settler colonialism- art that was recruited to create a new identity for the settlers and for the country from the beginning of the American Colonial Project. Landscape art was a crucial part of this effort, presenting the land …

From The Lens Of (In)Visibility: A Photovoice Inquiry Into How Community Colleges Can Advance Filipino/A/X American Student Resilience, Rangel Velez Zarate

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The dearth of research on Filipino/a/x American (FilAm) community college students perpetuates the narrative that they are regarded as “invisible,” receiving limited academic and social support. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent violence and discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) has exacerbated the already distressing academic and racialized experiences of FilAm students.

In this qualitative study, nine FilAm students who attended a community college in the Western United States participated in an online photovoice project which visualized their personal reflections and specific academic needs through digital photos and written narratives. Findings from this study indicated …

Uno Sguardo Oltre I Bordi Della Fotografia Coloniale, Simone Brioni Dr.

Department of English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Reimagining Identity Through Photography: The Experience Of Intersectionality For Asian-American Women, Noelle Song

CMC Senior Theses

"Reimagining Identity Through Photography: The Experience of Intersectionality for Asian-American Women'' aims to challenge the common stereotypes of Asian-American women in modern society by examining the history of their identities as both women and Asian Americans. The project highlights the negative consequences of complacency to these stereotypes, exploring the complexity of the model minority myth, intersectionality, and standpoint theory, while providing historical context to understand the violent crimes committed against this demographic. I curated a physical gallery space of 18 images featuring 9 Asian-American women to deconstruct racial and gender myths that contribute to the model minority myth. This exhibition …

Nuff Love: From Me To You, Katherine S. Thompson

Theses and Dissertations

The thesis exhibition, Nuff Love: From Me to You, explores the profound impact of diasporic memory on identity within the family structure, particularly for those who were born after immigration. This unpacking of memories is achieved through photographs, collages, and installations that reveal the distant and absent attributes that reside within the home. As a second-generation American of Afro-Jamaican descent, this thesis navigates how the dual identity becomes too complex and is never allowed to exist in a binary state. The constant state of in-betweenness between both cultures led to further questioning of selfhood beyond the Caribbean identity maintained by …

An Architectural Riddle: Billy Tripp's Minefield, Frédéric Allamel

Study the South

"The Mindfield, the sculptural environment created by self-taught builder Billy Tripp, is an alternative to architecture, or at least a countermodel that brings a novel perspective to the discipline. Challenging present architectural principles, such as functionality, cost-effectiveness, building techniques, and materials, the Mindfield opens the way to new possibilities. An ever-evolving edifice not designed to be inhabitable, and whose raison d’être emerged late in the building process, the Mindfield positions itself at the antipodes of mainstream architecture, thus enriching the architectural discourse with its innovative experiments. In building the Mindfield, Tripp inaugurates a holistic art where architecture, sculpture, and literature …

Ua12/2/2 Talisman: Forge, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Administration Documents

Fall 2022 Talisman:

• Our Mission
• Hunter, Leah. Forge
• Coles, Jack. Fakes
• Richer, Caily. Trailblazers – Kiara Braxton-Davis, Ashley Garrett, Torales Guadalupe
• Clifton, Zachary & Audrey Plescia. Built By Discipline – Bodybuilders, Meg Boshaw, Michelle Jones
• Jones, Michelle. Healthy Fried Rice
• Booth, Pandora. A Silent Strike – Quiet Quitting
• Moore, Emily. Strawberry Sun
• Fleshman, McKenna. Humans of WKU – Sada Jewel, Alaina Webber, Michael Ballard, Amara Danturthi
• Sandlin, Ellie. Forged in Fire – Zechariah Nelson
• Price, Devon. Not Too Pretty – Women in New Roles
• Whitsitt, Ashley. Ghost in Training
• Meyers, Jeffrey. Identity in Ink – Tattoos
• Hunter, Leah. After the …

Wings Of Change: A Visual And Cultural Analysis Of Mujer Angel, Taylor Carrico

The Compass

In the middle of the twentieth century, Mexico sought to reestablish its national identity. Following on the heels of the Mexican Revolution, an extended period of social upheaval and regional conflicts that transformed the country, artists and visionaries alike struggled to determine how the reborn nation would distinguish itself. While many movements in this period looked towards the future and sought utopia, there was one which concentrated instead on exploring the precolonial past and distilling the essence of “Mexicanity'' from there. This movement was known as the Mexicanidad in Spanish; or, in the precolonial Nahuatl language, the Mexicayotl. In …