Browsing by Subject "Photography"

This thesis explores the way digital technologies inflect experiences with and meanings of art historical objects. Specifically, it addresses the way digital technologies can change the archiving, exhibiting, and experience of ephemeral art. It does so by 1) providing a discussion of archival theory, museum practices, and the use of photography as a primary means of archiving ephemeral art, and by 2) creating three digital visualizations that focus on the same problematic but leverage different technologies: Palladio, Neatline, and Unity 3d, respectively. These archival exhibits highlight spatial, temporal, and relational details that are often lost in the photographic documentation of ephemeral art. Alone, the archives highlight specific aspects of ephemera, but collectively in the exhibit, a more comprehensive record of ephemera is achieved. This emphasizes digital technologies ability to create widely accessible archives, educational resources, and different archival processes that add meaning to the records.

This dissertation examines photographic representations of Ethiopian identity. It focuses on Emperor Haile Selassie I as a recuperative figure in Pan-African contexts, images by court photographer and later London studio portraitist Shemelis Desta, and contemporary works created by Ethiopian artists in the diaspora one generation after the Derg’s collapse. Exploring visual processes that concern, inform, and confront the practices of photographers working at the intersection of ethnic identity and nationalism, this dissertation scrutinizes Ethiopian artists’ views of the importance of their work to their country and to the African diaspora in conjunction with opposing historical narratives adopted by Black nationalists, and alternatively, white imperialists in the early twentieth century.

This dissertation examines the intersection of experimental art, literature, performance, photography, and architecture, as Japanese artists and intellectuals grappled with political disillusionment after the end of the protests against the ratification of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty of 1960. I focus on the work of the sculptors Miki Tomio and Kudo Tetsumi; photographs of late 1960s protests by Tomatsu Shomei and the self-portraits of the novelist Mishima Yukio; the collaboration between photographer Hosoe Eikoh and butoh dance founder Hijikata Tatsumi in the photo album Kamaitachi (The Sickle-Weasel, 1969); and depictions of the urban periphery in Hosoe's unfinished Private Landscape series (1970-) and the visionary urban planning of the architect Tange Kenzo. All shared an interest in portraying peripheral spaces, the detritus of the everyday, and the sexually perverse, cultivating a rhetoric of marginality that allowed them to explore their ambivalent feelings towards post-Anpo Japan.

This dissertation investigates the social, emotional, and ethical implications of looking at the suffering and death of African Americans. Drawing on film theory, visual studies, literary criticism, and semiotics, the study addresses events and images from 1834 to 2000 in which the humanity of the black body was called into question. The events discussed include: a nineteenth-century riot over the abuse of slaves; the mass media depiction of Hurricane Katrina survivors; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's 1935 antilynching art exhibition; James Allen's 2000 exhibition of lynching photography; the Emmett Till case; and the Spike Lee-directed film Bamboozled (2000). The project ultimately argues for a nuanced appreciation of looking relations that takes into account the ethics of the look, especially when that look is directed toward bodies that cannot speak for and in defense of themselves.

The visual representation of Indigenous North American peoples in contemporary visual culture continues to rely on romanticized images drawn from early twentieth century salvage ethnography surveys, presenting Indigenous American nations as part of the continent’s storied past while denying their active presence in contemporary society. This dissertation explores a body of conceptual art photography, created between the 1990’s and the present, that responds uniquely to the persistence of romantic ethnographic visual tropes. Focusing on the work of artists who are members of Native American nations situated within the United States, this study explores the relationships among anthropological visual conventions, Western philosophies defining what it means to be human, Western academic theories of photography, and settler-colonial history in North America. It delves specifically into the links between the foundations of anthropological visualities and later twentieth century theory positing the photographic image as a mode of death, popularized by scholars including Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and Martha Rosler, among others. I consider how the contemporary artists addressed intervene in these theoretical discourses of photography by way of interjecting elements of performance into photography. I identify and analyze strategies including the appropriation and physical manipulation of historic images; a reimaging of the photographic act; performative interventions into the still image; the use of satire and affect; Indigenous Futurisms; storytelling; and a radical collapsing of the boundaries between performance action and photography.

Realism, Race and Citizenship: Four Moments in the Making of the Black Body, Colombia and Brazil, 1853 - 1907 investigates the visual and literary mechanisms used to refurbish racial and social hierarchies in Brazil and Colombia in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery. Chorographic paintings, scientific photographs, identification documents, and naturalist literature are taken to together to argue that: on the one hand, the slave is the fleshy object that defines freedom and, in the postcolonial moment, citizenship. In "Realism, Race and Citizenship: Four Moments in the Making of the Black Body, Colombia and Brazil, 1853 - 1907," I propose that in geo-political spaces where the abolition of slavery and the re-branding of work were intensely debated and violently fought over, realist programs of representation facilitated the propagation of modern racializing schemas. Chapters 1 and 2 study the watercolors created for the Comisión Corográfica (the pre-eminent mapping project of nineteenth century Colombia) and scientific photographs produced in Brazil. These chapters uncover the stylistic conventions that make possible the staging of blackness as visible and immutable biological inferiority and as cumulative category that encompasses a variety of physical and social characteristics including but not limited to skin color, occupation, costume, and physical environment. Chapters 3 and 4 argue that the disavowal of slavery structures Brazilian naturalist novels such as O Cortiço (Aluísio Azevedo, 1890) as well as legislative debates about the nation and the citizen. By focusing on the visual and narrative orchestration blackness, my dissertation provides a critical framework for understanding how realist aesthetic conventions configured (and continue to animate) discourses of race and citizenship in Brazil and Colombia.

In the industrial vocabulary of the nineteenth century, “obsolescence” is regularly cast as a loss; it is the profit forfeited when advances in technology render the current means of production unnecessary. But in the twentieth century obsolescence morphs in both sensibility and cultural meaning, becoming a routine feature of discourses dedicated to the re-invention of the self, as in the declaration of an ad from the New York Times of November 12,1950: “New New a thousand times New (we’d rather die than obsolesce!)” Here and elsewhere obsolescence becomes valued for the distinction it helps to impart: that modernity is about newness, that futurity and commodities are often linked to the ephemeral. For the Futurists, “houses will last less long than we”; for General Motor’s Alfred P. Sloan, automobiles will change every year; for the post-WWII manufacturers of disposable goods, objects like Kleenex will lapse mere seconds after their use. My dissertation “Useless: The Aesthetics of Obsolescence in Twentieth Century U.S. Culture” studies how art acts as a repository for the obsolete, a “home” for the worthless objects, rejected places, and ruined bodies otherwise considered to be useless.

The project is divided into four chapters that trace how the presence of obsolescence in cultural texts produces aesthetic effects that resist, mourn, or disrupt the logic of obsolescence. In my first chapter, “The Totemic: Willa Cather, Mesa Verde, and Modernist Form,” I illustrate how modern artists form a relation to obsolete objects that is sacred. Reading Willa Cather’s novel The Professor’s House (1925) in relation to her own cross-country journey to Mesa Verde National Park in 1915, I argue that the park, the museum, and the World Exposition all demonstrate the ways in which the U.S. forges a “totemic” relation between its citizens and obsolete indigenous objects in the first decades of the twentieth century. This relation is what motivates the National Park Service to preserve the indigenous ruin and to accrue vast tracks of land and expend Federal resources to assure their continuity; it is also what attracts Cather to these particular objects as worthy of literary representation, producing a “totemic” form that mirrors the form of the National Park. Importantly, the various acts the U.S. is committing contemporaneously in order to preserve the ruins (expelling tribes from ancestral homelands, laying claim to sacred spaces, appropriating funeral objects) is actively under erasure in both the NPS and Cather’s text.

In Chapter Two “Decaying Spaces: Faulkner’s Gothic and the Construction of the Capitalist Real,” I continue the trajectory begun in the first chapter with a focus on how obsolescence impacts modernist aesthetic practice. In particular, I study William Faulkner’s novels As I Lay Dying (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), and Absalom, Absalom (1932) to illustrate how his literary modernism is not a movement dedicated to the “new” but is instead deeply invested in the objects (and bodies) made “useless” by industrialization. Interestingly, it is his investment in rusting artifacts that prompts literary critics to assign his works to the gothic tradition. Responding to this classification, I argue that since the categorization of literature often defaults to realism-mimesis as the originary mode from which all other genres deviate, many critical accounts of Faulkner tend to simply approximate how far his narration strays from accurately describing economic reality. The paradox is that Faulkner’s narration of the actual decay present in his cultural landscape is often not “real” enough to be considered realism; it is in “excess” of the real, which suggests that the capitalist real is an ideal referent containing only minimal traces of degradation. I therefore explore the tension in the first half of the 20th century between realism and Gothicism where, increasingly, the capitalist real comes to be articulated around that which is new, modern, and efficient.

Taking as its historical marker the automation of industry, Chapter Three “The Political: Junk, Trash, and Post-Modern Technique” investigates how a junk aesthetic begins to develop in the mid-century out of the detritus of industrial production. To illustrate how this aesthetic functions in literary texts, I examine Philip K Dick’s novels Time Out of Joint (1954), Ubik (1969), and Valis (1981) as well as his depiction in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) of “kipple”—all of the useless objects like wrappers, containers, and plastics that industrialism leaves behind and that ultimately threatens the grounding of our material existence. Since Gross Domestic Product peaks in the middle of the century, making these the years in which the United States floods the cultural landscape with a staggering amount of disposable goods, I argue that writers and artists in the 1950s and 60s (Bruce Conner, George Herms, Ed Kienholz) respond to this saturation by making sculptures and fictional worlds out of plastic chairs, dirty dishes, and wrecked autos, an illustration of how the obsolete commodity, meant to be ephemeral, takes on a new political significance in the art of the mid-century.

The last chapter “Apocalyptic Vision: Revelation in the Ruins of Detroit” examines how the city that perfects built-in obsolescence finds itself obsolete. In particular, I study how the recent proliferation of ruin photography circulating both online and in print registers the obsolescence of the U.S. industrial sector. Based on the sheer number of visual texts that take Detroit’s ruins as its subject: Lowell Boileau’s The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit (1996), Andrew Moore’s Detroit Disassembled (2010), Dan Austin and Sean Doerr’s Lost Detroit (2010), Julien Temple’s Requiem for Detroit (2010), Marchand and Meffre’s The Ruins of Detroit (2011), not to mention all of the amateur footage on YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook, I consider Detroit ruin photography to be a genre in its own right. I illustrate how the focus of these representations is on industrial decay—the ruinous landscape of post-industrial Detroit with its abandoned houses, defunct factories, and rusting ports, and argue that the effect of this decay is “apocalyptic”; it is, to paraphrase Michel de Certeau, the very concept of the City that is in decline. To illustrate the economic force of obsolescence, I interrogate how post-industrial artists like Detroit’s Tyree Guyton re-purpose defunct industrial objects into art pieces at the same time that portions of decaying Detroit houses sell on the global art market as found art.