Photography Commons^™

Companionship, Certainty, Integrity, Chandler C. Curtis

Masters Theses

being around people who surprise me, realizing how different we all are, broadening my conception of the world and my corner of it; being kind and considerate, giving others grace; being given responsibilities; being honest with and for myself; braiding my hair collecting free things; critique discussions and any setting to diligently read objects; Culton; dancing; doing sudoku or other ‘hackable’ puzzle; doing things that seem impossible, especially for someone else; drying off with a towel that absorbs well, particularly after a cold shower; eating cantaloupe; encouraging others to trust themselves, using my experiences to support someone else's journey; exchanging …

Temporary Constructions, Elliott Golden

Masters Theses

Temporary Constructions is a photographic series made by a process of multiple exposures, material assembly, and surface intervention on large format film. Working in a photographic lighting studio, I build provisional structures from scrap wood and metal and photograph the structures in multiple possible forms to produce images that are visually intelligible but spatially impossible. In my writing, I situate these images within a longer lineage of artists using photography to recast our relationship to surface and depth, and consider what that lineage reveals about contemporary mediation and the increasingly blurred boundary between image and object.

The Image Falls Apart, Alexa N. Curran

Masters Theses

The Image Falls Apart is a phenomenological account of my collision with Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross (ca. 1435). In an ever-expanding landscape of visual stimuli, how do we make sense of images that are an encounter with the sacred? Of what use to a modern viewer is an altarpiece of the late medieval period that, in its miraculous rendering of each of its human figures, reflects the impending iconophobia of the Protestant Reformation? And what does falling have to do with it? With careful attention to the assembly of bodies in space, this multidisciplinary project, …

Floaters, Kyle Gyumin Dong

Masters Theses

The eye is often regarded as the primary sensory organ of the human body, and the ocular system as our most reliable means of perceiving the world.

With vision, we travel across vast distances through telescopes to expand our knowledge of the observable universe and peer into the hidden world of atoms through microscopes. At the same time, we seek divinity from apparitions in the clouds, broaden the range of colors visible under closed eyelids, and catch a brief glimpse of the future in clairvoyant dreams.

My photographic practice oscillates across this spectrum. Between reason and intuition, between the measurable …

The Body Has Its Own Time, Wen Zhang

Masters Theses

In embodied practice, the artist’s experience and body become the medium through which thought and expression take form, not as illustration, but as primary material. Performance art has long occupied an unstable position within contemporary art: celebrated in retrospect, underfunded in practice, and selectively institutionalized. Its marginality has never been evenly distributed. Certain bodies, female, racialized, aging, non-normative, have remained further outside the archive than others, their work harder to collect, harder to value, and easier to forget. To work in performance, particularly as a woman, is to work within that contradiction.

For me, performance is less a form than …

American Paradise, Virginia Hanusik

Masters Theses

The following is a collection of stories and ideas about the making of our physical and emotional worlds, along with their fracturing, deconstruction, and degradation within the American industrial landscape.  It suggests the value of the unknown and the grace of mistakes, emotional and material friction, and the hiccups that come with learning.

For American Paradise, I’m bringing my interest in landscape extraction, and the people and families within them, to my own autobiography. In this work I turn to where I grew up, the people that brought me there, my connection to manual labor, and the use of specific …

A Star In A Fish's Sky, Garrett S. "Faustino" Miller Oblsb

Studio One

No abstract provided.

Like Native Grasses...We Rise, Garrett S. "Faustino" Miller Oblsb

Studio One

No abstract provided.

John, Herald Of The Coming Light, Garrett S. "Faustino" Miller Oblsb

Studio One

No abstract provided.

Floating In Lake Sag, Garrett S. "Faustino" Miller Oblsb

Studio One

No abstract provided.

Photovoice As A Resilience Tool For Helping Professionals In Complex Trauma Work, Pamela Lie

Expressive Therapies Dissertations

Helping professionals (HPs) working with complex trauma operate in emotionally demanding environments that place them at increased risk of burnout, secondary traumatic stress, and compassion fatigue. Resilience has therefore been identified as an important resource for sustaining well-being and effective practice. While photovoice has shown potential as a participatory approach for fostering resilience across diverse populations, its application among HPs engaged in complex trauma work, particularly within Asian contexts, remains limited. This study examined how seven HPs engaged in complex trauma work from a single organization in Singapore experienced and perceived photovoice as a resilience-building tool. The study employed a …

War Photography & The Limits Of Empathy, Andrea Shi

Student Theses and Dissertations

The proliferation of photography, particularly war and poverty photography, has had massive implications for the level of vividness with which Americans are able to picture suffering beyond their doors. The mass atrocities that have occurred since the advent of photography – that is to say, the last 200 years – are so relentlessly circulated that they feel, sometimes, as an inevitable byproduct of human nature. It’s not surprising, then, that a lot of media theory and analysis reduce the dilemma of atrocity photographs to a psychological level. Do they numb us, or do they incite empathy? Are they a call …

“Una Vita In Maschera”: Exploring Modern-Day Venetian Carnival Through Photographs, Amy Hecht

Honors College Theses

This project aimed to explore the historical and cultural significance of Carnival in Venice, the festival preceding Lent that is characterized by a temporary breakdown of the social order. The main elements of Carnival include mask-wearing, elaborate costumes, and artistic showcases, especially theater and street performances. In particular, the 16th-century practice of commedia dell’arte is revived during the Carnival, featuring iconic masked characters and humorous storylines. In the current global political climate, where people are more divided than ever, Carnival is an escape from the drags of everyday life. Masses of tourists visit Venice during Carnival to experience the unique …

In The Garden's Grasp, Lacey Anderson

The Cicadian

This piece pairs a close-up photograph with reflective creative writing to explore a fleeting moment in a backyard garden ecosystem. Among vivid dahlias and winding vines, a grasshopper emerges, captured both in image and in story. Together, the photograph and prose invite readers to witness how tending, noticing, and lingering can transform an ordinary patio into a world alive with quiet, electric life.

Concrete Crumbles, Drew M. Dzurko

Graduate Artistry Projects and Performances

Concrete Crumbles examines instability within contemporary American political and social life through photography, collage, and installation. Using construction zones and damaged infrastructure as primary subject matter, the project investigates how material transformation and fragmentation can function as metaphors for political precarity, media saturation, and the erosion of civic stability. Photographs are printed on copy paper, physically cut, rearranged, collaged, and scanned into unstable compositions that resist fixed perspective and seamless representation. These processes emphasize labor, impermanence, and reconstruction while challenging photography’s traditional association with objectivity and permanence.

The work is informed by historical and contemporary influences including Brassaï, Germaine Krull, …

I Taught Myself To Feel Nothing, Jeaneliz Marie Martinez Maldonado

Student Projects

Jeaneliz Martinez is an artist who decided to challenge herself to confront personal insecurities by placing her own body in front of her camera. What initially stemmed from an inability of looking at herself without the feeling of disgust became a central point of exploration within the work.

This series is exploring Jeaneliz’s ongoing struggles with mental health. Using self-portraiture, she captures moments of vulnerability, tension, and introspection, while also addressing the complexities of healing. Each image functions as a visual fragment of her journey, reflecting both the weight of past experiences and the effort required to move towards self-acceptance. …

Lost, Not Found, Lily K. Ostrovsky

Student Projects

Found, Not Lost is a documentation of a fictional cult in DeKalb that worships an unseen entity believed to live within the surrounding corn fields. It grew out of the isolation I felt when I first transferred to NIU, when making friends and interacting with people felt difficult, and it seemed like everyone around me already belonged to something I couldn’t access. That experience began to feel like being surrounded by an impenetrable cult.

Pests that plague corn crops, handmade corn husk dolls, teeth, and nails are present throughout this series. These elements, in conjunction with low-contrast light, are meant …

Forgotten In The Smokies, Diego G. Torres

Student Projects

The Great Smoky Mountains are riddled with old and forgotten places. The tree canopies shield abandoned buildings, structures can be found with their fireplaces and flooring still in place, just overgrown and cracking, cemeteries of people long since dead, still with flowers at their bases. At night, the woods hold you in place, too dark to venture out and many streets missing a streetlight. It's an old place full of rich and abundant history, it will however keep you in if you let it.

Diego Torres is a Chicago based photographer who leans towards horror-esqe photos inspired by artists like …

A Soft Ending, Atara Schulhof

Quill & Scope

No abstract provided.

A Different Perspective, Atara Schulhof

Quill & Scope

This was the view as I walked out of the hospital where my grandfather was in the ICU—a familiar medical setting seen from an unfamiliar role. The sunset caught me off guard, with its soft light stretching upward and a quiet sky holding more than I could process. A plane passed in the distance, as if moving life forward while mine felt paused. “A Different Perspective” reflects the way medicine changes when you are not the one in the white coat, but the one walking out into the evening, carrying both loss and light.

Book Review: More Historic Rural Churches Of Georgia, Austina Jordan

Georgia Library Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Heirlooms Of Virtu, Santos Nunez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Heirlooms of Virtu explores familial history as a mode of self-study. By examining childhood, the more possible it can be to navigate the contemporary. Research into the self becomes the bridge between two states of being, allowing for a better understanding and a more purposeful approach to the future.

As an artist working primarily in photography and video, I am recontextualizing key nostalgic concepts with technology through interactive sculptures and video installations. My research alludes to classic toys and technologies specific to my childhood in an effort to find and understand the self. Nostalgia as an idea not only exists …

Taking A Deeper Look: Attributing Tonal Values Of Photolumens To Their Emulsions Using Scanning Electron Microscopy, Anna M. Moore

All Theses

This thesis examines whether tonal variation in photolumens made with historic silver gelatin photographic papers can be linked to differences in elemental composition. Photolumens are cameraless photographic images created by placing objects directly on light-sensitive paper and exposing them to ultraviolet light. Because expired and historic darkroom papers often produce unpredictable colors and tones, this study asks whether visually defined tonal groups also show measurable chemical differences.

Twenty historic paper samples were exposed, documented, and sorted into five tonal groups based on visible image characteristics. Each sample was then analyzed using scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-EDS) …

Part Of The Family, Brian Garbrecht

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Part of the Family examines television as both a domestic object and a cultural force. TV was not simply something my family watched, but something we lived with. Through CRT televisions, VHS recordings, family photographs, altered TV Guides, fictional broadcasts, and immersive living-room installations, the project explores how television shaped memory, kinship, attention, and belonging in the American home. Drawing from my family’s archive of Chicago-area broadcasts recorded between the 1990s and early 2000s, the work treats VHS as a hybrid form of home movie, preserving the flow of commercials, news, station IDs, sitcoms, movies, and accidental overlaps that structured …

The Rem Series, James W. Conkis

Student Projects

James Conkis is a film photographer who blends traditional photography with modern

digital methods. James’ work is a way to consolidate memories from past experiences from

growing up in the Midwest. He strives to take timeless images that make people question when

they are taken. James takes photos with medium format 120 film, and 35mm film cameras. He

develops his own film, makes his own darkroom prints, and edits scans in Photoshop. James

Conkis is currently attending Northern Illinois University to receive a BFA in Photography. His

current series of dreams, The REM Series, is a continuation of night film …

Precious: Platinum Palladium Prints., L.J. Rhodes

Research and Creative Works Expo

This body of work by L.J. Rhodes represents a significant shift from direct portraiture to the exploration of human presence through the "traces they leave behind". Driven by a personal sense of urgency following a diagnosis of heart failure, Rhodes uses this project to contemplate mortality and the legacy of objects.

UA LIttle Rock disciplines:photography; art; fine art

Belmont Literary Journal Launch Event, Jason J. Riley Iv, Audrey Blake, Darwin Canales, Claire Carrillo, Abigail Coe, James Derryberry, Istbra Elmi, Bevan Johnson, Ava Lange, Keira Naab, Bailey Passarelli, Ava Rowland, Leticia Schueth, Samuel Shepley, Margaret Simpkins, Owen Tarro

SPARK Symposium Presentations

Join the Belmont Literary Journal in celebrating the launch of their online publication! This presentation will include insights from the journal’s staff, selected readings from the poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction categories, refreshments, and time to connect with Belmont’s diverse creative community.

Editors, The Alembic

The Alembic

No abstract provided.

Volume 104, Number 1 - Spring 2026, The Alembic

The Alembic

Cover "The Stars are Screaming in the Field Outside my Apartment" by Hale Mueller

Table Of Contents, The Alembic

The Alembic

No abstract provided.