Photography Commons^™

Moretheless, Abdelghani Alnahawi

Masters Theses

material investigations becoming questions with interjections

Making Then Meaning, Ben Denzer

Masters Theses

This is an artist talk contained within a book. It is 816 pages and 49 minutes long. Closed captions run across the spreads. A video of this talk can be watched on bendenzer.com/making-then-meaning

At RISD, I’ve been prompted to expand the scope and tools of my practice and to reflect on questions of meaning in my work.

I spend my days making things, but I’ve never really had good answers to questions of why I make the things I make, or what their meaning is. I don’t think there are simple answers to these questions.

I think meaning comes from …

Step 10, Jinhong Cai

Masters Theses

Step 10 is an experiment on provoking empathy through

abstracted elements within my studio practice. I am

proposing to craft an emotional piece without leaning

on my identity. This written thesis consists of two parts:

narrative prose and an explanation of my studio practice.

While the installation is entirely devoid of cultural or

personal references, this text-based thesis is full of them

because it is intended to inform whoever is interested in

learning more about the motive behind this creation.

The questions I bought into the thought and creation

process are: Can a piece of art still successfully bring

out …

I Looked & Looked, Magali Duzant, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Photography

64 unnumbered pages : color illustrations. "This hardcover edition is published to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the love letters exchanged between Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz on September 25, 1923."-- bibliographic "Notes" page verso of colophon page. ""... artist book borrows its title from a love letter that Alfred Stieglitz wrote to Georgia O'Keeffe on the night of September 25, 1923. In his letter, Stieglitz describes a full, white moon over Lake George, New York. On the same night, O'Keeffe penned a description of a pink moon, as witnessed from the shore of York Beach, Maine. Inspired by the …

When Eye Land, Star Feliz, Manuel Arturo Abreu, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Photography

156 unnumbered pages : illustrations (some mounted color), facsimiles, maps, plates. "Published as part of Printed Matter's Emerging Artists Publication Series. First edition of 800 copies ""Printed Matter is pleased to publish When Eye Land, a new artists' book by Star Feliz. The project builds on Feliz's research-based installation work, wading into memory, intimacy, and the ancestral past to explore how the legacy of colonialism has shaped the national identity of the Dominican Republic. What gets left behind when identity and belonging is removed from a relationship to land and spirit, shaped instead within the white European patriarchal imagination? How …

Viajes : Peru 1973-74, Ed Grazda, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Photography

22 unnumbered pages : chiefly illustrations. "Edition: 300 copies. ""17 B&W photographs, Printed in New York, March 2023""--colophon. Includes three lines of text from, ""Los rios profundos"" by José María Arguedas. Pamphlet stitch. Gift of the Grazda. RISD Alumnus, Photo, BFA 1969."

Paper Lighthouse, Keavy Handley-Byrne, Margaret Sartor, Cara Buzzell, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Photography

56 pages : color illustrations, portraits. "Edition of 40. Includes the essay: You can close your eyes by Margaret Sartor. Designed by Cara Buzzell. ""In 'Paper Lighthouse', the artist Keavy Handley-Byrne brings together found images of women with their eyes closed: accidental archival photographs tossed aside before there was a delete button. ""But accident always plays a role in photography,"" writes artist and writer Margaret Sartor, in her essay included in the book. ""Because it is precisely in the unpredictable and unintentional details of a photograph that the magic of the medium flourishes."" --Publisher. Adhesive binding. Postcard laid-in. RISD Alumna. …

Moemoeā, Brendan George Ko, Jeremy Haik, Sophy Hollington, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Photography

2 volumes (98 and 32 unnumbered pages) : chiefly color illustrations. """Moemoeα explores the revival of traditional voyaging in Hawaii and how the canoe became a catalyst for connection, cultural empowerment, and fostering humanity's relationship with the natural world. It is a story of how ancient knowledge and modern science coalesced to revitalize a nearly extinct cultural tradition and a testament to the power of dreams, or moemoeα. The first book, The Spell, opens with a series of lush photographs that capture life on the open ocean, lulling the reader into a sensory experience. Drawn from ancestral voyaging mythology and …

Distant Flash

Photography

3 volumes : chiefly illustrations (color and b&w). Title from glassine paper band around volumes. "First self-published edition of 30." --band. vol. 1. Elasticity of Time -- vol. 2. Merging of Space -- vol. 3. Layers of Sociality. "Focusing on the overlapped realm of photography and travel, Distant Flash attempts to explore how the photographic practice can intervene and transform our embodied experience, not replace it, with our own initiative at play. The artwork takes its form in a three-volume photobook set. The photographs are deliberately curated and "installed" within the printed mediums, constructing immersive ways of viewing similar to …

Desire Lines

Photography

208 unnumbered pages : chiefly illustrations (some color) . Cover title 'Desire Lines' follows old and new movements through the desert landscape of the Sonoran borderlands of the United States and Mexico: paths taken by migrants and border agents, of missionaries and conquistadors, of indigenous people and industrialists. The messy and at times violent collision of peoples has created a region that defies the harmfully simplistic narratives so frequently attributed to our borders. Shipley's photographs focus on the disorienting experience of this landscape, a place of beauty or danger depending on the perspective of those moving through it. Deceptively empty, …

Lonely Highway: Mile Marker

Photography

124 unnumbered pages : chiefly illustrations (color). "Mile Marker is the first volume in my Lonely Highway series started in 2004. In making Mile Marker, I photographed various landscapes and familiar scenes associated with car travel using a variety of digital and analogue cameras. Documenting subjects only while I was in motion and transport; Mile Marker is a collection of photos capturing the beauty of the world as one could only see it by automobile. This Second Edition printing has added photographs, a new cover design as well as location titles for each photograph." --From artist's website. Color photography. Perfect …

The Aesthetics Of The Mexican Public Garden And Its Photographic Compositions (1912-1982), Victor Hugo Rivera-Diaz

Masters Theses

In Mexico, there are currently several collections of photographs which depict the history and development of public gardens and ecological corridors under the management of the National Institute of Anthropology and History. By focusing on two exemplary collections—the Nacho López Collection and Vicente Luengas Collection—I apply a visual studies approach to the photographic archive in order to formulate the Mexican public garden as a branching set of aesthetic (sub-)categories, all of which take into account the creation of garden landscapes vis-à-vis land use policies and historical accounts during the rise of Mexican modernity. In so doing, the primary sub-categories of …

Mason & Dixon: History And Identity In The Borderlands, Drew Leventhal

Masters Theses

My project, Mason & Dixon, traces the footsteps of the original surveyors of the Mason-Dixon Line and their search for purpose in the borderlands between Pennsylvania and Maryland. For the past 250 years, the Line has inscribed a violent and painful scar on the land, filled with memories and (re)written histories. Holding the legacies of slavery and colonial expansion deep in its soil, the region is now a visceral example of the ongoing divisions and conflicts around the past, the present, and the future of the United States. The friction is in the air, it is in the monuments, and …

Rememory, Jonathan Mark Jackson

Masters Theses

Rememory, coined in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, refers to the psychological action of placing forgotten or misplaced memories into a narrated context within the self. Rather than directly “remembering,” the characters in Morrison’s novel, like their author, rely on a web of socially produced or shared memories as a way to understand their past. This essay catalogs an on-going performance of rememory in my photographic work. Through an interrogation of physical archives, I remap the historic presences of Black life in New England. This research based practice takes me to the preserved homes and to the workplaces of my …

Bewildering Narrative, Ali Newhard

Masters Theses

“Bewildering Narrative” outlines three videos, Denouement, Happy Endings (2021), and Drowning the Muse. These works critique the climactic narrative form using formal breaks in digital media to push viewers’ perceptions of storytelling into a place of bewilderment. To do so, I treat narrative conventions of continuity, character, and climax as mechanisms that articulate heterosexual desires and expectations. The videos visually, textually, and auditorily rupture this phallocentric organization of narrative storytelling. These interventions take the form of poetic fragmentation, repetition, and displaced exposition where the narrative disorients the viewers’ attention rather than determining and regulating it. Editing plays a key role …

The Great Delusion, Beth Johnston

Masters Theses

The climate crisis is a wicked problem that poses many obstacles for action and understanding. This thesis is a non-linear accumulation of academic essays, interpolated with lists, anecdotal observations, data, and artwork that together explore the entanglements and complications of the climate crisis and my journey in making artwork as a response to those complications. The thesis surveys six bodies of artwork created over the course of graduate school, which use photography, sculptural installation, performance, and video to illustrate various topics and methodologies. Grounded in research on environmental justice, this essay explores temporal disjunctures, climate data encounters, the decolonization of …

Dead Letter Room, Allie Tsubota

Masters Theses

Dead Letter Room is a photographic and textual dialogue with images that emerge from the end of the Asia-Pacific Wars and World War II in the Pacific. These images are governed by the historical contexts that produce them; they are mediated by the explosive aftershocks of nuclear war, the transoceanic space of imperial desire, and the onset of oblivion in the aftermath of catastrophe. Throughout this essay, I present the historical, image-theoretical and psychoanalytical frameworks that meaningfully guide my address of historical images and my approach to making new ones. With detours through various artists and theorists, I offer the …

Pod + College Crusade Photo Journaling 2022, Project Open Door

Project Open Door + Onward We Learn

Participating artists: Abigail, Abdoulaye, Amelia, Aneishka, Emely, Gaby, Joanne, Jaxson, Joshelin, and Simone.

Photography is a tool that can help us to “SEE.” What does this mean? If we are not visually impaired, we can, of course, physically see. But how much do we miss seeing? How much do we take for granted unless we take the time to look? With assignments that hope to inspire careful observation, we can use the camera to observe things in our familiar surroundings in quite extraordinary ways. Photography can help us become more observant and help us have a fulfilling visual life. During …

Pod + Onward We Learn (College Crusade) Photo Journaling 2022, Project Open Door

Publications + Documents + Videos

Participating artists: Abigail, Abdoulaye, Amelia, Aneishka, Emely, Gaby, Joanne, Jaxson, Joshelin, and Simone.

POD partnered with Onward We Learn (formerly known as College Crusade) to provide unique and engaging virtual summer workshop experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this online workshop, students were given daily photo challenges to create portraits and still life photographs. They found textures, shapes, colors, numbers, and letters through photographic explorations of their familiar surroundings. In doing so, students created an individual photo journal over the week.

Photography is a tool that can help us to “SEE.” What does this mean? If we are not visually …

Fastidiosa, Jean-Mar Caimi, Valentina Piccinni, Tiffany Jones

Photography

228 pages : illustrations (some color). First discovered in the touristic Gallipoli region in 2013, the bacteria Xylella Fastidiosa has rapidly been killing olive trees in Salento over the past several years. The disease is spread by sap sucking insects and stops the flow of water and nutrients through the xylem vessels, causing trees to die from the inside out. In an effort to contain further outbreaks, EU authorities dictate that all trees within 100 metres of one affected must be destroyed, whether it is infected or not. The result is economic catastrophe in a region where olive oil production …

You Can Call Me Nana, Will Harris, Tiffany Jones, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Photography

1 volume (unpaged) : illustrations (some color), portraits. Three inserts laid into text. A personal yet universal family memoir, this story introduces us to Will's grandmother, Evelyn, who suffered from dementia in the later years of her life. As her memories eroded, history and fiction collided and a new relationship bloomed; once her grandson, the young photographer became an old friend, creating this work while trying to make sense of a newfound connection and to deal with his own grief. At times both haunting and lighthearted, this book weaves together family archives with altered images, collage, and new photographs including …

Atlas Of Voids, Kathleen Alisch

Photography

96 unnumbered pages : illustrations (some color)

Rosy-Crimson, Kim Hoeckele, Wendy Vogel, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Photography

65, [64] pages : color illustrations. "Comprised of two parts spiral bound together on opposite edges. One part, Rosy- consists of 28 color photographic images of dawn, titled 28 Suns. The other part, Crimson, contains the script of the play Rosy-Crimson along with and performance notes and an essay entitled ""An intimate alienation,"" by Wendy Vogel. 'Kim Hoeckele's performance Rosy-Crimson results from the accidental misreading of a recurring line in Homer's Odyssey--""dawn's rosy fingers""--which she transforms into a willful reconfiguration of meaning. Appropriating all the text from the Odyssey that references dawn, Hoeckele's script centers the feminine personification of daybreak, …

Restored/Access, Keko Jakcson, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Photography

1 volume (unpaged) : illustrations (chiefly color). "Edition of 300. ""Photographs by Keko Jackson, 2020-2021."" Text pages are printed on a different and smaller size paper stock and interspersed throughout the illustrated plates. Metal spiral binding."

Madres Terra

Photography

118 pages : illustrations, portraits + one booklet (24 unnumbered pages). Numbered edition of 1000. "Japanese style stab binding (double folded pages), which allows opening the folds with a thread where a piece of lead hangs. Paradoxically, the lead ('plomazo") was the one that caused the death of their children."-- publisher. Prólogo. Madres terra / Sebastián Ramírez H. Black and white photography. In Spanish. Accompanying booklet with English translation. Since 2008, photographer Carlos Saavedra and anthropologist Sebastián Ramírez have worked with the association "Madres de Falsos Positivos de Soacha y Bogotá" (MAFAPO) made up of mothers, wives, daughters and sisters …

I Just Can't Get You Out Of My Head : Frenetic Vortex, Animal As Image - Field Notes (1989-2021), Steffanie A. Padilla

Masters Theses

This essay is an attempt to describe a hypnosis induced by media through the accumulation of images in everyday life starting the day I was born. Raised by television and the internet, I go through a chronological timeline of my life selecting banal memories to showcase how violence to animals became neutralized/rendered invisible. The work is primarily concerned with mental health while focused on the youth, ecological destruction, and how sensory overload keeps us from knowing ourselves. The motivation of this paper is to better understand how our environment shapes our reality by using a psychological, media theory, and cognitive …

Becoming A Precipice: The Liminality Of Queer Cruising, Chance Deville

Masters Theses

In “Becoming a Precipice,” I am analyzing queer cruising areas as psychological landscapes from a queer, non-binary perspective, counter to heteronormative conventions. These landscapes are important to me, as being a full participant in this culture is my main form of sexual interaction. My inquiry is prompted by the need to interpret how this specific form of desire molds itself into visceral responses and manifestations of performative masculinity. Entering the cruising landscape itself increases awareness and intensifies the senses, in a space where signals become critical in determining transactions with other individuals beyond spoken language. These somatic reactions are uniquely …

Wounds Need Air, Camilla Jerome

Masters Theses

A personal essay in the first-person voice describes the artist’s lived experience navigating the American medical industrial complex with multiple misdiagnosed chronic pain disorders. The artist’s personal story spans thirty years and is contextualized by illness, gender, race, age, ability, class, and is grounded in the artistic expression of self. Descriptions of mental illness, physical disability, and access to proper healthcare are weaved into an examination of embodied knowledge.

Imaging "Interracial": Performing Racialized Desire In "Interracial" Heterosexual Hardcore Pornography, Megan Christiansen

Masters Theses

“Interracial” is a term that implicitly categorizes sex between Black cis men and white cis women within contemporary hardcore pornographic video. The artistic and research practice described in this paper is located in, influenced, and driven by pornography itself as an important entry point for thinking about racialized desire.

Looking with care and criticality at the pornographic representation of sex between Black men and white women can allow us to think about how issues of gender and race are key in constructing notions of desire and taboo in America. Through this work I begin to consider how racism and misogyny …

Martyr (In Exile), Xinyi Mei

Masters Theses

Xinyi Mei (meimei) is an image maker. She looks to make assessments on the moments when consilience is woven through viewing and limited imagination. She also uses images to examine the precarious state of identity flowing between the individual and the collective. She usually practices with video installation, photography, and writing.