Submitted in fulfilment of the Degree of Master of Arts (Fine Arts) Johannesburg, March 2017 / This dissertation uses David Goldblatt’s seminal photobook, On the Mines (1973, revised 2012) to mediate a biographical conversation with Raymond Zavala, a migrant mineworker who left Mozambique in 1962 to live and work in Johannesburg. On the Mines was used as a vehicle to examine intimate details of one man’s life in the mines, focusing particularly on a mine in Roodepoort known as Durban Deep, where Raymond worked for 38 years. During my visits with Raymond, On the Mines was kept in hand as he and I walked through what once was a prosperous mining town. We would discuss his day-to-day life as a migrant, mineworker, husband and father, and began layering and inserting our own stories and photographs over and into On the Mines in an attempt to portray a more personal account of one person’s life on the mines. Goldblatt’s photographic archive is crucial to this process in that it enabled me to initiate conversations with Raymond about his personal history, memory and identity. This research, encompassed in the visual biography presented here, was created in collaboration with Raymond. He guided me through this process by directing the narrative of his own story, recommending specific landscapes and people for me to meet and photograph.  I have chosen to present this practice in the form of a photobook, so that its concept and content can be shared as a critical resolution of my visual and narrative engagement. / XL2018

This dissertation explores a vital moment in the history of Japanese photography through a sustained monographic analysis of Kawada Kikuji’s 1965 photobook Chizu (The Map). Through this first full-length English-language study on Kawada’s early work, I argue that Chizu is a palimpsest, where Kawada mobilizes both the malleability and medium-specificity of photography to create a temporal atlas of postwar Japan. Chizu is not legible cartography, but instead is an archival universe where the atomic bomb and its victims, Japan’s past military aggressions, and national narratives of ruin and growth are interwoven in a state of temporal confusion and perpetual haunting. Chizu is also wedged chronologically and theoretically between two periods in the history of Japanese photography: the early 1950s hegemony of postwar “realism” and the avant-garde project of Provoke in the late 1960s and 1970s. My dissertation intersects a sociopolitical and psychological history of postwar Japan with visual and iconographic analysis, accompanied by comparative frameworks of contemporaneous publications that also dealt with the subjects of the atomic bomb, the Second World War, and the political unrest of the early 1960s. By structuring the dissertation around the three major thematic categories that I have identified within the visual language of the photobook—the “stains” of the Atomic Bomb Dome, the “memorial goods” of the Second World War, and the “signs of the present”—I dissect and contextualize the temporal layering and theoretical stakes at work within Chizu’s complex network of traces. Chizu’s enormous significance lies in its refusal to settle on a firm aesthetic or theoretical language of photography, preferring instead to alternatively mobilize and refute indexicality, to put forward a multisensory experience of the photograph, and to cast assumptions about photography’s legibility into deep suspicion. I argue that this is a singular gesture of the period, one born not from individual subjectivity as dogmatic artistic ideology, but instead from an existential state of questioning the foundations of photography's relationship to time, to index, and to legible narrative. Finally, I argue that Chizu stands as an important artistic illumination of the concept of a longue durée violence: In this case, a violence continuously and insidiously enacted on a body of citizenry well before and well after the zero hour event of the atomic bomb.

Orientador: Omar Khouri / Banca: José Spaniol / Banca: Neiva Pitta Kadotta / Resumo: Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo a apresentação, investigação e leitura da série de fotografias intitulada O Cinza e a Carne, bem como o diálogo entre as referidas imagens e reflexões sobre as capacidades documentais e artísticas da linguagem fotográfica. Para fundamentar tal abordagem, buscou-se aliar um instrumental teórico referente a discursos e conceitos que acompanham a trajetória da fotografia, ao relato da Autora sobre o processo de criação e produção das imagens. A dissertação está, portanto, dividida em três partes: a primeira, com a exposição das fotografias, em um formato de livro de imagens; a segunda, com todo referencial teórico sobre a linguagem fotográfica e a terceira, com o relato das experiências de morar no Parque Cecap e fotografá-lo, além da leitura das imagens / Resumen: Esta pesquisa tiene como objetivo la presentación, investigación y lectura de la serie de fotografías titulada El Gris y la Carne, bien como el diálogo entre éstas imágenes y reflexiones sobre las capacidades documentales y artísticas del lenguaje fotográfico. Para fundamentar tal abordaje, se ha buscado combinar un instrumental teórico referente a discursos y conceptos que acompañan la trayectoria de la fotografía, a el relato de la Autora acerca del proceso de creación y producción de las imágenes. La disertación está, así, dividida en tres partes: la primera, con la exposición de las fotografías, en un formato de libro de imágenes; la segunda, con todo referencial teórico sobre el lenguaje fotográfico y la tercera, con el relato de las experiencias de vivir en el Parque Cecap y fotografiarlo, además de la lectura de de las imágenes / Mestre

Made available in DSpace on 2014-07-29T16:27:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao Rafael Castanheira 1.pdf: 4927020 bytes, checksum: 974f39812f105ee892243cbf79db602a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-05-27 / This research aims at discussing the status of the contemporary documentary photography based on both a literature review and an analysis of five photographic series focused on Amazonian area. Those series were produced by three Brazilian photographers: Pedro Martinelli, Claudia Andujar and myself. We conclude that in contemporary photo documentaries a narrowing between reality and fiction can be noticed. The border between the impartial register of the facts and the fiction built over the real has become tenuous. Therefore different proposals of photo documentation have been developed based on the origins of its authors, their habitat, training, visuals references and the cultural practices of their time. / Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo principal discutir o estatuto da fotografia documental contemporânea, a partir de uma revisão bibliográfica sobre o tema e da análise de cinco séries fotográficas produzidas por Pedro Martinelli, Claudia Andujar e por este autor, tendo a região amazônica como foco. Concluímos que nos fotodocumentários contemporâneos percebe-se um estreitamento entre a realidade e a ficção, com a fronteira cada vez mais tênue entre o registro imparcial dos fatos e a ficção construída sobre o real. Dessa forma, surgem diferentes propostas de documentação fotográfica, cujos autores vão buscar desenvolver seus trabalhos com base em sua origem, seu meio, sua formação, suas referências visuais e nas práticas culturais do seu tempo.

Submitted by Erika Demachki (erikademachki@gmail.com) on 2014-09-22T21:30:26Z No. of bitstreams: 2 DISSERTAÇÃO_final Edson Freitas.pdf: 8402016 bytes, checksum: 8623d07fcba56566499f748e3fd2fbbd (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2014-09-23T15:36:21Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 DISSERTAÇÃO_final Edson Freitas.pdf: 8402016 bytes, checksum: 8623d07fcba56566499f748e3fd2fbbd (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2014-09-23T15:36:21Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 DISSERTAÇÃO_final Edson Freitas.pdf: 8402016 bytes, checksum: 8623d07fcba56566499f748e3fd2fbbd (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-08-22 / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Goiás - FAPEG / In “Regarding the Pain of Others”: the concept of document in forensic photography I propose to discuss the status of photography as a mirror of the real, investigating in particular the case of forensic photography (also known as criminal photograph, evidence photography or expert photography), the ones that are produced in the context of the judiciary with the purpose of assisting in the construction of criminal evidence. From my professional experience as a photographer of the Scientific Police of the State of Goias and working with crime scenes photographs produced by me, taken during a 24 hours journey, discussing photography‘s legitimizing by science, supported mainly by its character likelihood, and incorporating the concept of photo-document proposed by Andre Rouille (2009) I analyze the relations between the photographer and the criminal scenes, questioning the constant exposure of mutilated bodies scenes in their daily work. / Em “Diante da dor dos outros”: o conceito de documento na fotografia forense discuto o estatuto da fotografia como espelho do real, investigando em particular o caso da fotografia forense (também conhecida como fotografia criminal, fotografia de evidência ou fotografia pericial), aquela produzida no contexto do sistema judiciário com a finalidade de auxiliar na construção de evidências criminais. A partir de minha experiência profissional como fotógrafo criminalístico da Polícia Técnico-Científica do Estado de Goiás e trabalhando com as fotografias de cenas de crime produzidas por mim durante um plantão de 24 horas, discuto a legitimação da fotografia pela ciência, amparada sobretudo pelo seu caráter de verossimilhança, e, incorporando o conceito de fotografia-documento proposto por André Rouillé (2009), reavalio as relações do fotógrafo criminal com a cena de crime, questionando a exposição constante a cenas de corpos mutilados em seu cotidiano profissional.

The "linguistic turn" in early twentieth-century philosophy established that through language we not only live in a world but create it as well. Language, in this sense, incorporates the entire range of media and cultural artifacts through which we create and share meaning. In contemporary post-industrial societies, photographic images play a central role in communicating and creating the world in which we live. In part, this increasingly visually oriented culture is possible because we tend to equate what we see in photographs with what is real. Photographs, however, bring to light a vision of the world, not the world itself. From the inception of photography, traditions of aesthetic interpretation have challenged this dominant view. Here, the created image becomes a vehicle for the artist's unique expression. Proponents of social scientific and critique of ideology perspectives, however, reject the aesthetic view and typically see art objects as social constructs, instruments which enhance and maintain a certain social order. Each of these perspectives ultimately holds that the meaning of photographs can be determined objectively. At the same time, each presents a world view which tends to exclude the insights of the others. Any attempt to preserve the apparent insights of these views must, then, transcend the basic contradictions and incompatibilities between them. Philosophical hermeneutics holds that the presumption of an absolute, objective grounding represents a failure to grasp the nature of the path toward understanding, a path which can never arrive at its destination because it always exists in history. It argues that (1) the photograph cannot be transparent to the world for the world is constituted in our representations of it; (2) art is a creation whose origin and meaning always exceeds the artist's own understanding of it; (3) critique is not the application of universal reason but a reading from a particular vantage point and is always grounded in a tradition of its own. Most importantly, however, it calls us to recognize the participatory nature of all understanding, the universality of language and provides a criterion for assessing the relative value of our interpretations across the entire language world.

Honors Thesis (History)--Oberlin College, 2001. / Title from home page. "May 2001." Description of resource as of: June 19, 2001. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis consists of two parts. The first is a series of photographic essays documenting the lived experience of a woman who is HIV positive and a group of young females who are socially marginalised. The written component attempts to underlabour in a philosophical sense for the artistic/creative element of the thesis. That is, it seeks to take on a range of theoretical issues that cluster around the practice of documentary photography. By clarifying these issues the thesis endeavours to act as a stimulus to artistic practice and also to explain and introduce that practice to a wider audience. Among the theoretical issues addressed is the ontological status of the documentary photograph. Here, the thesis draws upon Roy Bhaskar's Critical Realism to suggest a rational alternative to postmodernist scepticism and naive realism. The thesis also takes on a range of ethical problems. Most important of these is the question whether the relationship between the photographer and her subject is inherently exploitative. The thesis attempts, in this case, to unite Emmauel Levinas' philosophy of the Other with Critical Realist Ethics. Here, the thesis advances a novel differentiation of the Other and combines this with the Critical Realist notion of ontological depth. The argument of the thesis is that the nature of the contract between the photographer and her subject depends on which Other the subject is regarded as. In addition, the thesis explores the social and gender dimensions of documentary photography concentrating in particular on the Farm Security Admininstration photography in America in the 1930s, and the radical self-imaging of the British photographer Jo Spence and the Pop Star Madonna.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Western Sydney, 2003. / "A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Critical Social Sciences Research Group, University of Western Sydney" Bibliography : leaves 312-335.

Thesis (D. App. Psych (Community))--Victoria University (Melbourne, Vic.), 2008.