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A thesis submitted to the faculty of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Film and Television studies / The aim of my research paper is to investigate the portrayal of albinos and albinism through visual culture in the South African context. The research examines the different forms of representation associated with this frequently marginalised group of people. It will also explore the relationship between these representations and real-lived concerns regarding albinism, conveyed through visual mediums of photography and film. 'Difference and otherness', 'stereotyping' 'abject', 'freakery' and 'fetishism' are the specific theories of representation that contribute centrally to the theorizing of this research. They are concepts that are frequently used to define and describe people living with albinism. In the pursuit to further understand albinism, a creative short film titled Beyond Our Complexion is a part of the complementary research component. (Abbreviation abstract) / Andrew Chakane 2021

It is a relatively recent phenomenon to see memorials as indictors of remembering the dead along South African roadsides. These memorials are expressions of places where death occurred. These expressions are arranged with visual and material elements, substantiated with some symbolic, often religious, meaning. This research wants to make the connection between Material Religion and Visual Culture Studies by investigating the way in which roadside memorials are compositionally arranged. Ten examples of roadside memorials were selected and discussed in order to come to some understanding of the connection between religious convictions and visual expressions thereof. / Dissertation (MA (Visual Studies))--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Visual Arts / MA (Visual Studies) / Unrestricted

This research report examines the notion of the photographic document as subjective register in contemporary South African visual culture. It provides a critical framework for considering my own photographic practice, which explores how photographs can be used to concretize emotion and to register the subjectivity of the photographer. In exploring this subjectivity, I consider the notion of truth-value in the photographic document, especially in socio-documentary photography, focusing on some examples from the South African ‘struggle’ tradition. I then look at the shift towards a personal approach in photography in South Africa, using the exhibition Democracy’s Images: Photography and Visual Art after Apartheid as a case study of these shifts towards the personal in South African photography. The show helps to locate my own work, which is highly invested in the personal. The notion of affect is unpacked in considerable detail since my own work focuses primarily on the evocation of emotional experience.

This dissertation is a study in representation. More specifically, it is a study in the representation of art and of art history as melancholy representation. The latter is produced or opens up, because objects of art â pictures, images, or Bilder (read âlikenessesâ) â have a tendency to withdraw or turn away from view. Objects of art, which may be thought of as âthinking objectsâ or âliving imagesâ, that is, as quasisubjects, negate complete ownership. Like living things, objects of art are infinitely incomplete; they arise out of an ongoing process of becoming and disappearance. As such, our relationship with them may be said to be one of âmutual desireâ, want and lack. Moreover, as Michael Ann Holly (2002) has argued, the study of art history is bedevilled by lost, obscure, or obsolete objects; cloudy, shadowy, ghostly, even corpse-like objects that deny total acquisition or last words. It is in this sense that one can say art history â perhaps like any history â is a melancholic science. It is also from this melancholy perspective that this dissertation reflects, in various ways, on the imaging of history as catatastrophe or as catastrophic loss â as this is figured in the work of Walter Benjamin, Anselm Kiefer, and William Kentridge. How then do we write about art and the history of art, when the objects of our study are both too close and too far away, mutually absent and present â fleeting, yet seemingly permanent? How can one âimageâ the catastrophic debilitation of melancholic disavowal or death of self, without succumbing to its debilitating attractions? Following on from Max Penskyâs (2001) tracing of the historical image of melancholia as dialectical, the aim of this dissertation is to delineate a discursive space for perception and reflection; a critical space within which to think of the melancholic im-possibility of representation qua possession, as essentially negatively dialectical: futile and heroic, pointless and necessary. Finally, this dissertation asks: how can one write about the imaging of history as castastrophe, as this is figured from within different historical frameworks: that of an early twentieth century German-Jewish philosopher, a late twentieth/early twenty-first century German artist, and a late twentieth/early twenty-first South African-Jewish artist? How can one hope to relate their essentially melancholy work without becoming culpable of ahistoricity or even pastiche? No easy answers have been forthcoming during the writing of this dissertation. However, it is my delicate contention that reading and picturing their work in and as a melancholy constellation whose parameters shift depending on oneâs point of view, as opposed to submitting their similarities and differences to rigorous systematic analysis, has revealed surprising and enlightening elective affinities. In the final analysis, visual and philosophical analogy has the last say. And this seems fitting, especially where one encounters a writer and two artists whose thinking in images tirelessly challenge our thinking âlogicallyâ in words alone.

This thesis analyses the culture of printed images during the Elizabethan period, particularly those images of a religious nature. Focusing on images which depict invisible beings (i.e. angels, God, demons etc.), the thesis addresses the assumption that Protestant England all but completely eradicated religious visual imagery from society. Examining images that were first created and printed in Elizabethan England as well as older images which had been recycled from earlier texts and others imported from Europe, the research offers an analysis of Protestant printed imagery between 1558 and 1603. Questions of how images were read, altered, augmented, copied and transmitted across time and space have been posed. What was depicted and how? How were religious images used? What was their understood role in early modern print culture? How did Protestants distinguish between church images to be destroyed and printed images to be read? In this, the images have been historically contextualised within both the theological and cultural milieu of Calvinist theology, the growing international marketplace of print and early modern English society. Attention has been paid to how images were received by readers and how they may have been seen. Emphasis is placed upon the role of the printed image as both a representation and an agent of culture, as well as an integral aspect of the printing industry. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to explain how printed images were employed and utilised by both printer and reader in the context of an iconoclastic English Reformation.

This dissertation engages America's illustrated sheet music through topical analyses of political and social ruptures from the Civil War to World War I. In so doing, it demonstrates that music illustrations fit into larger networks of American picture making, participating in the recording and redirecting of contemporary American anxieties. Chapter 1: Bloody Banner, Silent Drum: The Material Wounded on Civil War Sheet Music argues that violated flags and drums in music illustrations transcended their martial functionality to signify loss of innocence and life; in so doing, they took on their own subjectivity. Chapter 2: Banjos, Rifles, and Razors: Picturing American Blackness investigates the transition from black-face minstrel songs to the "coon song craze" of the 1880s and 1890s, arguing that the stock character's razor, a weapon frequently figured in the songs, was not only a symbol of violence but of white fears of black social mobility. Chapter 3: Hoopskirts and Handlebars: Gender Construction and Transgression in Victorian America offers two case studies, one of cross-dressing pictures after the Civil War, the other of gendered bicycle images, arguing that the American public between the war and the turn of the century enjoyed contemplating the flexibility of gender roles and boundaries. Chapter 4: "There Were Giants in the Earth": Monsters of the First World War argues that popular pictures of American giants and monstrous war machines engaged in symbolic battle with monstrous Huns, who symbolized German atrocity for a Euro-American public uncomfortable with the idea of war with European peoples. At the same time, giants represented the common belief of America's special role in international peace, as neutrality gave way to declared war. Sheet music illustration was a vibrant part of American visual culture. By assessing the layered meanings of these often ignored pictures, my dissertation seeks to recover and restore lost memories of America's usual but fraught visual romance with popular song.

In recent years, the study of the body has developed rapidly across many disciplines, including visual art, art history, gender and cultural studies, queer theory and sociology among others. In regards to the body, definitions of the “human,” “sub-human,” “acceptable,” “unspeakable” and “non-human” vary widely depending on the societal context. In Western culture, artists have introduced new bodies and ideas to viewers. What may have been unspeakable a century ago, such as the queer body and self-asserting sexual female body, is now more commonplace, although there is still resistance. The introduction of new and unspeakable bodies is always met with controversy. Often the contested unspeakable body is not new but rather is brought into visibility in public spaces that have been purposed for the representation of normative dominant bodies that ‘belonged.’ This paper has two aims; one is to reflect on the figure of the “unspeakable” body in collective national memory, past and present; the second aim is to ask questions about the role of art and visual culture in contesting, decoding and re-figuring discourses of national identity and the ideal citizenry.

This dissertation examines memory discourses about the most recent military dictatorships in Brazil and Argentina produced in two photography exhibitions (the Brazilian government sponsored A ditadura no Brasil 1964-1985 and Marcelo Brodsky's Los compañeros) and two novels (Beatriz Bracher's Não falei and Sergio Chejfec's Los planetas). My research focuses on the capacity of postdictatorial cultural production to explore the negotiated spaces of meaning in both individual memories and collective discourses about the past. Drawing from interdisciplinary theoretical considerations on such themes as memory, representation, discourse, and subjectivity, I argue that cultural production that accentuates the impossibility to fully represent the past creates the conditions of possibility for spaces of dynamic memory about the military dictatorships in Brazil and Argentina. These cultural spaces of representation offer the opportunity to destabilize the discursive logic that typically guides postdictatorial memory narratives through the reiteration of the same (counter)hegemonic political ideologies that dominated these eras of dictatorship. While I critique the A ditadura no Brasil photography exhibit for its presentation of an idealized counter-narrative about this time period, I contend that the memory discourses offered by Brodsky, Bracher, and Chejfec create spaces for a more meaningful engagement with the dictatorial past, particularly for those who did not directly experience the authoritarian governments in Brazil and Argentina. I maintain that instead of attempting to articulate a narrative "truth" about dictatorship, these works lay bare the negotiated processes of memory and meaning for the readers and spectators, which offers an opportunity to activate memory for new uses within different socio-political contexts in the present. Through this dissertation project, I seek to contribute to recent critical work calling for a new language to articulate the memory of dictatorship and innovative ways to engage traumatic experiences of the past through both literary and visual culture expressions. The continued consideration of memory discourses produced in postdictatorial cultural production is an essential component within the ongoing debates on the transmission of social memory about dictatorship in Brazil and Argentina, and for other populations attempting to engage the violence of an authoritarian past and its residual effects on the present.

This thesis discusses the gift in terms of presence and interpretation using varied examples of image that form a visual culture. It contextualises the term "giftness" by analysing its use and our socio-cultural understanding of its function as it relates to the gift process. The hermeneutic processes attached to both the gift, and gifting, are multifarious and require examination of moments of instability present in the act of interpretation and meaning. The gift relationship is juxtaposed against the relationship between image and reader/observer to highlight the abstract quality of the gift and its inherent instability that exists within gift interpretation in general. The fundamental structure and unity of the gift, as is based upon relations between subjects, helps to identify and analyse systems of power and subjectivity developed in terms of investment in order to emphasise the complexities that arise through inter-subjective relations, particularly gift exchange, and those between subject and image. Certain theoretical models help to exemplify and illuminate this thesis, predominantly post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theories. The gift’s condition of instability is further examined in terms of discursive formation and function, looking at how the gift is enunciated so that one can recognise a gift and giving, and acknowledge its problematic status. The relationship between subject and image is investigated to see if we are able to read this investment as a gift relationship within the context of giftness, that is when giftness operates as an instable and challenging element to discursive exchange in visual mediums such as film, painting, television, art and photography. An examination of the gift aporia in this thesis is directed towards a subject’s investment in the image. What transpires between subject and image is akin to what circulates between giver and receiver, on the basis of investment. On this basis, the present configuration of giftness is utilised in terms of the image.