Amplifications in photographic production and the increased access to images in the 21st century uniquely position photography to articulate and intervene in social structures of power and provide new opportunities for civic engagement. In particular, photography has the potential to articulate and resist what can be understood as a politics of disposability, or the ways in which particular populations are rendered superfluous to the economic and social logic of neoliberalism and channeled out of society. I assert that neoliberal violence must be understood, in part, as a visual problem: the particularities of representation and visibility must be examined in light of the need to consider neoliberal social and economic policies as something other than an inevitability. This dissertation explores the ways that photography can serve to make visible not only the people and discourses that have been marginalized and suppressed, but the structures of disposability itself. Developments in artistic practices and departures from traditional documentary genres converge with precarious labor conditions for cultural workers to widen the parameters for photographic production. The resulting work engages both with the ontological questions of what documentary photography has become as well as with its ability to operate as a potential site of activism—rather than mere representation—through new modes of mediation. This dissertation examines new photographic work that addresses the multiple facets of a neoliberal politics of disposability, the effects of which are compounded by race, class, and gender: police violence and domestic militarization, the skyrocketing rate of women’s incarceration, and the institutional threats to youth and activism in the public sphere. These emergent photographic practices employ new strategies of visualization in order to complicate the viewer’s relationship to representations of violence, contributing to a discourse that broadens the possibility for a critical and productive use of photographs, and imagining alternatives to the material and ideological conditions of neoliberal disposability. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation examines the ability of emergent modes of documentary photography to articulate and resist social and political violence that is characteristic of neoliberalism, for example the domestic militarization and increased incarceration rates, the shrinking of access to the public sphere, and the particular ways in which certain populations become especially vulnerable to such violence. Shifts in photographic production thanks to new media platforms and the reconfigurations of traditional photography genres have produced photographic strategies that are crucially poised to address such issues. The photographers and projects explored in this dissertation employ new ways of visualizing violence, speaking back to the ways that photography can be used to stultify discourse and misrepresent populations, and harnessing innovative modes of proliferating their work to produce new photographic and political communities.

Blind Items examines the multimedia production of celebrity through the eighteenth century, especially the way in which the same texts, images, anecdotes and poses were recycled and updated to evoke a series of public notables. In the multimedia explosion accompanying the Enlightenment, cultural productions typically read as static and self-contained – from mezzotint prints, shilling pamphlets and novels to popular songs, fashions, jokes and gestures – were instead constantly repurposed to suit successions of public figures, each passing luminary determined by the present cultural moment. Surveying three arenas in which eighteenth-century celebrity was manufactured – fashion, sex, and sport – my archive demonstrates that even canonical authors and artists of the period built their careers on the passing celebrity of others, and indeed maintained the relevance of their productions by perpetually remaking and updating their celebrity referents. Blind Items contests critical assumptions regarding the singularity of celebrity, instead focusing on interchangeability, commutability and disposability. In so doing, the project troubles ongoing assumptions regarding the rise of the individual, as it explains why modern-day celebrity still retains aspects of the Enlightenment mold that first gave it shape. / text

Our value of people and craft are linked. With the rise of fast production  industry, and the lack of transparency when it comes to a role of consumption, we have become detached from making processes. This detachment is  detrimental to our understanding and empathy for other people but also to ourselves. It perpetuates disposable ways of living and keeps us reliant on  disposable consumption.  Craft is an undervalued tool which can be utilised in historical learning as well  as anthropological study today. In doing so, we are able to understand more about humanity by inspecting craft through the ‘three facet’ lens. We are then  able to develop empathy for other people and other cultures, through the non- tangible space created during the process of crafting. For those who do craft,  this recognition is empowering and enables cultural ownership. It also empowers us as individuals, when we are able to produce something ourselves  and physically see the learning process.  This means we can recognise who has made our objects, and appreciate the  time, skill and commitment which goes into the undertaking. This encourages us to appreciate objects, to consider our ways of living and move away from  disposable consumption.  Through a comparison of the relationship to craft that is held in Peru, with that  of the relationship we hold in the UK, and broadened by my experience living and teaching in Sweden, I conclude that industrialisation and colonialism has a  role to play, but ultimately, the power and potential of craft, is physically in our own hands.  I propose using the ‘three facets’; Utility, Aesthetics and Connectivity, as a way to break down the information documented through craft, to analyse, at a deep  level, what can be gained from craft appreciation.

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