Photography Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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.

Fossil Morphology, Leah Zhang

Masters Theses

Fossil Morphology is a multi-media art project based on my research on the coal mining area in East Pennsylvania. It consists of a film, a series of photographs, and a sound installation. Together, the three works form a dialog among each other about the ecology and aesthetics of the region’s coal mining landscape and its underground.

For a long time, coal, as an raw material for mass production, has been understood and examined from its economic values and social meanings. The gradual abandoning of this material by our industry therefore leads to the seemingly inevitable decline of the coal mining …

Black Mental Health: Unravelling The Stressors And Stigma Surrounding The Mental Health Of Black Men, Joel Isimeme

Masters Theses

Mental health and illness have become increasingly relevant concerns in contemporary society. While the collective conversation around psychological health has begun, within the black community, mental health remains taboo. Mental illness is seldom seen as affecting black people. All individuals, however, are susceptible to mental illness, especially black men of African descent. This thesis, therefore, aims to explore the everyday experiences that adversely affect the mental health of black men. Specifically, it seeks to identify the factors that contribute to this mental ill-health. To this end, it will examine the role of society, religion, and the media in stigmatizing poor …

These Inadvertent Marks, Thomas Wilder

Masters Theses

These Inadvertent Marks is a photographic investigation of scuffs, stains, residue, scratches, holes, and blemishes as a complex set of inadvertent marks which possess an inextricable relationship to the human intention to find and make meaning in the world. Excluding marks that are clearly the result of highly substantial accidents, I look to consider those which are largely deemed trivial and peripheral as a means of renewing perception and surrendering to the unconsidered. The photographs included are the result of a process of discovery and close consideration through wandering in my local surroundings: urban streets, private homes, airports, bathrooms, alleys, …

First Sweet Truth, Jessina Lynn Leonard

Masters Theses

First Sweet Truth is a photographic dialogue with mystical texts written by Christian women in the late Middle Ages. These visionary accounts are not only significant historically—many of them are the first known texts to be written by women in the West—but, moreover, provide a foundation for non-anthropocentric knowledge. In our contemporary landscape informed by algorithms and data-driven forms of knowledge, mystical experience inherently defies the logic of our time. Today we largely assume seeing to be a disembodied act. In a constant flow of images, our eyes skim, understand, move on—what the philosopher Laura Marks calls seeing-as-mastering. In contrast, …

Amor Fati, Keavy Handley-Byrne

Masters Theses

I am searching for a way to grieve someone I never knew. At age 26, I was lucky enough to meet the woman who would become my wife. We quickly discovered that there were many coincidences and connections that could be found when we examined our lives a little more closely – our parents shared a wedding anniversary, our fathers each had five siblings, Alice’s parents shared their names with my grandfather and his second wife (Walter and Joan). But what quickly became apparent to me were the links between Alice’s mother and my grandmother. Apart from photographs and memories …

The Knots On The Underside Of The Carpet, Lily Colman

Masters Theses

A woman enters marriage, guided by a rich lineage of strong, lifelong marriages, yet is also caught in a web of misplaced ideals and expectations deferred by culture. She carries the weight of these histories, as well as her own expectations. Throughout history, women have been minimized and shoved into their own separate, domestic “spheres.” Future generations inherit these traumas, which in turn affects how they experience life. When a woman realizes her marriage is not what it should be, that she has been turned into a flat and unfulfilled version of herself and ultimately files for divorce, the weight …

Make Yourself At Home, Han Seok You

Masters Theses

“Make Yourself at Home” is a personal journey of self-documentation to discover a definition of “home” and family, and to reenact the missing scenes from my youth. As a child who grew up in many different places far away from home, I missed out on many family moments and a sense of belonging. As a South Korean passport holder who has lived mostly in North America, my identity is unresolved. I find myself in the balance between Korean and American. With the progression of this project, I try to reconcile my past in order to gain an understanding of my …

Exploring The Enneagram Through Visual Aesthetics: Profiles For Personal Home Décor, Sarah K. Casmass

Masters Theses

The home is an environment that is the prime center for self-expression, personal sanctuary, and solace. On a psychological level, the home is a representation of the individual and, therefore, that individual should identify and find pleasure in their personal home space. Decorative art has long provided visual solutions for our innate desire to accentuate our spaces and express ourselves. However, there is a need for a connection between the visual arts and the augmentation of our basic psychological needs through home décor. With countless resources available for an individual to become more self-aware, there is a deficit in the …

Between Gods And Animals : Deconstructing Heteronormative Masculines Pursuit To Sustain Power, Shawn Bush

Masters Theses

Between Gods and Animals is a multi-angle exploration of the Caucasian heteronormative male’s endless pursuit to sustain power and inability to live by their own set of codes. Using the Grecco Roman period as an origin point, this work examines the forces that have historically perpetuated the myth of masculinity. Relating past ideals of maleness to contemporary standards this thesis illuminates patriarchal structures that are systematizing masculinity while providing a space to normalize a gamut of masculines. The visual works included act as an introspective approach in accepting the complacency of my existence as a man who has operated within …

Pretend Power, Rosemary Engstrom

Masters Theses

This is an anti-thesis about being a tender and tuff queer femme bitch with mental illness trying to exist in this shitty world by creating worlds of their own. With bright colors, video performance, dress up, collage, and a lot of feelings, I turn power structures on their upside. They become a game of pretend where queers run the show. It’s ok to be sick. It’s ok to be vulnerable. It’s ok to be queer. You’re not alone.

Visualizing Grief: An Exploration Of The Stages Of Grief Through Image And Design, Audra L. Rygh

Masters Theses

Grief is an emotion that people have felt since the beginning of time, but in modern culture, there is a lack of visual representation of the five stages of grief. Because grief is a highly personal and unique experience, it can be difficult to visualize what those stages may look like for the mass population. However, if one could develop an understanding of what each stage includes, as well as a study of the thoughts and feelings of those who have experienced grief, this research could aid in the creation of an accurate representation of the stages of grief. The …

A Photo Illicit Study Of Black Women's Sense Of Belonging At A Predominately White Institution, Kayla Alexandria Slusher

Masters Theses

This qualitative study sought to examine how Black women define and create their sense of belonging while attending a predominately White institution using a photovoice approach. The women took photographs of spaces that they frequently occupy and then engaged in a face-to-face interview to discuss the photographs. The researcher also investigated four Black women, ranging from junior to graduate level, to identify how they developed a sense of belonging at the research site institution. Results of the study showed that a feeling of comfort was most important when identifying belongingness in a space. The participants were able to create a …

Naturally Occurring Form, Margaret Kristensen

Masters Theses

I am trying to find art in my body, attempting to create images that personalize and desexualize the nude. Between the body of images that we have access to via social media and the images we have seen of female nudes, emphasis is put on finding the form to be within western society’s acceptable range of beautiful; so rarely do we find organic figures existing in the photographic environment.

Having been taught how to photograph the body by looking at images of women taken by men, I don’t see myself. The photographs by Edward Weston and Irving Penn look, gaze, …

Once There Was There Wasn't, Svetlana Bailey

Masters Theses

Objects, places and events that occur in separate times and places can coexist psychologically. My work supposes that this coexistence can be reconciled with photographs, which, although normally fixed to particular times, locationsand stories, are nevertheless able to travel, in boxes, or as mind images on overlapping currents.

I return to places of imaginative influence in my life: to my grandmother's house in the Russian countryside where I spent my summers as a child, and to my parents' home in Germany. Through this journey of return, I am transported in time, as if opening a time capsule. Here I discover …

Mid-, Elise Kirk

Masters Theses

This thesis explores a personal and cultural tension between rootedness and restlessness, set against the backdrop of my native Midwest. The large-format portrait and landscape photographs reflect a paradoxical longing to pull up stakes and put down roots, and the liminal state we often dwell in as a result. Playing on the conception of the Midwest as a transient zone to be passed through en route to somewhere else, the work refers to the pervasive belief that our greatest hopes and potentials can only be realized in some other place, at some future or past time. It’s a syndrome I …

The Void, The Mystery, The Vast Array, The Infinity Of Unities, The Otherworld, The Absolute, The Hidden Order, The Randomness, The Infraworld, The Nothing, The Zone Of Immaterial Sensibility, The Silence, The Hollow Of Space, The Ineffable, The Emptiness, The Wild, Drew Ludwig

Masters Theses

This thesis presents the culmination of two years of excursions into and longing for the void: the sense of absolute presence and connectivity that I have always found in the desert of the Colorado Plateau. Away from the desert, I use my artistic practice as a means of approaching this kinship with the wild, the void.

My work may be understood as a series of experiments, striving to locate and access the void through different language, logic and media. My process speaks to a deep respect for the external wild of landscape (the desert), and a growing recognition of the …

Seven Seas Without, Ambereen Siddiqui

Masters Theses

In my work I explore dislocation within a diasporic experience. I use personal and familial accounts of migration, assimilation and reverse culture shock to examine and add to the collective narratives that underlie national as well as individual identities. In reconciling my own sense of loss in having moved away from Pakistan, I appropriate histories, recreate memories and envision futures to mould the present. Investigations of personal experiences inform an analysis of the larger social, political and historical contexts. In my practice I use video, animation and new media technologies to “re-view” archives. My sources include audio and text from …