Master of Visual Arts / This paper grows out of my ongoing practice of photographing the Darling River in western NSW. My interest in imaging the landscape and representing the contemporary divisions within it led me to investigate previous colonial conflicts, which occurred as white explorers in the 1830’s and squatters in the 1850’s took over the Aboriginal tribal lands on the Darling. In this paper I investigate the images created by explorers, artists and photographers, which were the beginnings of a Eurocentric vision for this land. These images were created in the context of a colonial history which forms the ideological backdrop to historical events and representations of this land. This research has involved me in an investigation across three different disciplines; Australian history, Australian visual art, and environmental aspects of human interactions with the land. The postcolonial histories which inform my work are themselves re-evaluations of earlier histories. This recent history has revealed, amid the images of European ‘settlement’ and ‘progress’, views of frontier violence and Aboriginal resistance to colonisation that were excluded from earlier histories. The fan-like shape of the Darling River, which for millennia has bought water to this dry land, is the motif that focuses my investigation. I discuss the relatively recent degradation of the river, which is the focus of contemporary conflicts between graziers, Aboriginal people, environmentalists and irrigators. Because large-scale irrigation now has the capacity to divert the flows of entire rivers for the irrigation of cash crops, the insecurities of earlier generations over the ‘unpredictable’ floods and their perception of lack of control over water - has been entirely reversed. ‘Control’ of water is now held by irrigators and the river down stream from the pumps is kept at a constant low, becoming a chain of stagnant waterholes during summer. Like many rivers in industrialised countries, the Darling no longer flows to its ocean. The physical characteristics of rangeland grazing are an important background to my paper. Although the introduction of sheep and cattle has altered and degraded this landscape, unlike ploughed country to the east this land retains much of its native vegetation and an Aboriginal history embedded across its surface. This paper is an investigation of the changing representations of the Australian landscape, and central to my paper (and a result of growing up in this area) is my recognition, at an early age, of cultural difference in the context of this landscape. I became aware of contradictions in how Aboriginal people were treated by the ‘white’ community and I glimpsed the distinct cultural viewpoints held by Aboriginal people. A connection to country continues to be expressed in art produced by Aboriginal people in the Wilcannia area, including work by Badger Bates and Waddy Harris. The Wilcannia Mob, a schoolboy rap-group received national press coverage, winning a Deadly Award in 2002 for their acclaimed song ‘Down River’. While a discussion of these artworks is not part of the discussion of my paper, it is a context for my research. In broad terms this paper is an investigation of different worldviews, different views of land and landscape by graziers, Aboriginal people, environmentalists and irrigators. These views carry with them different cultural understandings and different representations of the land - different and sometimes opposing views of its past and its future. It seems in 2005 that, just as artists, historians, filmmakers, etc. are beginning to come to terms with Australian colonial history, as the El Nino seasons and the importance of ‘environmental flows’ in the Murray Darling Basin are increasingly understood, that technological changes and the global effects of population densities are creating other changes (greenhouse gasses, ozone depletion, climate changes) that once again appear to be unpredictable and beyond our control. While this environmental discussion is outside the scope of the current paper it is a context for my investigation of this landscape.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1992. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 37-41).

'The Yangtze is China’s Mother River. It is my Mother River.’ This practice-based PhD research was initially motivated by the researcher’s personal search for The Mother River and a critical question in finding her own vision of the river. As the field experiences contradicted the researcher’s expectation of The Mother River, the research methodology changed and led to a new, critical understanding: The Mother River is mythic. This thesis examines the politics and characters of such a myth. It also asks with what research methods and visual strategy can landscape photography interrogate The Mother River myth’s complexities. Between 2010 and 2014, the author conducted eight field trips to the Yangtze River. Initially working observationally, it soon became apparent that this method alone was insufficient in reaching an original understanding of the physical and cultural Yangtze landscapes. A series of tactile interventions within the landscapes were then performed and critically evaluated prior to the next phase of the research, in which the entire 6,211 km of the Yangtze River was photographed at precise 100 km intervals. A new body of photographic work titled Mother River was produced as a result. To test its effect in challenging the myth, Mother River has been staged in 12 international exhibitions and printed in one complete catalogue. Over 80,000 people visited the shows in China. Deep mapping, which combines experiential and contextual research with multi-sensorial emplacement as a key method, emerged from this research process and is argued as a new contribution to the field of photographic research. Meanwhile, the artistic output of this research, Mother River, is the most systematic documentation of the entire river made by one person since the 1840s. Furthermore, it is argued that using the Y Points System as a physical framework and storytelling a visual strategy, Mother River challenges the mythic Yangtze The Mother River with a scale and complexity rarely employed by other photographers.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the work of landscape photographers living and working in the Southern region of the United States and to explore what their images visually communicate about their relationship to the Southern land and its distinctive history. This objective is accomplished through an analysis of the work of three contemporary landscape photographers who reside in the South, and work primarily within their local hometowns. This thesis examines the work of photographers William Christenberry, Sally Mann, and John McWilliams. Each is a photographer who is native to the American South and has used his or her indigenous Southern landscapes as subject matter. These photographers' work not only articulates the connection between the artist and the land in and on which they have lived, but also provides social and political commentary on the South's struggle to maintain its identity while grappling with its haunting past. The research for this thesis has been derived from primary sources, including the artists' images, museum and gallery exhibitions and published writings. A "reading" (as defined by Alan Trachtenburg) of individual images is used as support for the central argument, as well as discussion of a photographer's work as a whole. Interviews with the photographers in academic, popular and trade publications were also used. Historical and academic literature on Southern history and culture is used as reference in order to provide a framework in which the photographers' work is positioned. Photographers who are native to the South are particularly adept at portraying the region's distinctive culture and growing pains as it struggles to come to terms with an ever-changing America. Images of the South by natives of the region are noteworthy because they are imbued with the artist's own individual emotions about their land and their history. Southerners are an American demographic who feel a distinct tie to the land from whence they came. Therefore, Southern landscape photography offers its viewer a gateway through which to explore this complex relationship between landscape, home and history.

In 1976 two young photographers, Mark Klett and JoAnn Verburg, and a photo-historian named Ellen Manchester came together with an idea to rephotograph sites in the American West that had originally been documented by survey photographers such as William Henry Jackson and Timothy O'Sullivan. By the spring of 1977 and with the support of various organizations they began a project that spanned the next three years and would eventually become known as the Rephotographic Survey Project (RSP). In many ways, the RSP represents an important moment in the history of photography and the representation of the American West. Through analysis of their work, archival documents, contemporary sources, and interviews with the original members of the RSP and several others, this dissertation examines the activities of the project and its various members, which also included Gordon Bushaw and Rick Dingus. More than the RSP, this dissertation also focuses on the growing culture of photography that boomed in the 1970s. Photography was no longer seen as an outsider to the world of art but was benefiting from newfound opportunities and growth. Without such a culture, this work argues, it would not have been possible for the RSP to take place. By the end of their project, however, photography was undergoing another important transition as modernism was giving way to the more critical climate of postmodernism. When the RSP finally published their work In 1984, their project and the community of photography that fostered their ideas was undergoing profound changes. This study also closely examines the RSP's fieldwork in the American West and the various discourses that the project encountered in this meaningful space. Like photography, the West was undergoing significant changes that the RSP was able to observe and document. Through their process that matched images from the past with photographs of their present, the RSP was able to record diverse landscapes that had or had not changed over the subsequent century. Furthermore, it also provided insight into the ways in which the West had been represented and perceived over time and in a new history of the West.

Theses (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 134-148). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 1982. / Vol. [2]: Plates, Checklist. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (vol. [1], leaves 351-357).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 1979. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [340]-358).

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1986. / "A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science (Landscape Architecture)."

This dissertation historicizes the enduring marriage between photography and the American road trip. In considering and proposing the road as a photographic genre with its tradition and transformation, I investigate the ways in which road photography makes artistic statements about the road as a visual form, while providing a range of commentary about American culture over time, such as frontiersmanship and wanderlust, issues and themes of the automobile, highway, and roadside culture, concepts of human intervention in the environment, and reflections of the ordinary and sublime, among others. Based on chronological order, this dissertation focuses on the photographic books or series that depict and engage the American road. The first two chapters focus on road photographs in the 1930s and 1950s, Walker Evans’s American Photographs, 1938; Dorothea Lange’s An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, 1939; and Robert Frank’s The Americans, 1958/1959. Evans dedicated himself to depicting automobile landscapes and the roadside. Lange concentrated on documenting migrants on the highway traveling westward to California. By examining Frank’s photographs and comparing them with photographs by Evans and Lange, the formal and contextual connections and differences between the photographs in these two decades, the 1930s and the 1950s, become evident. Further analysis of the many automobile and highway images from The Americans manifests Frank’s commentary on postwar America during his cross-country road trip—the drive-in theater, jukebox, highway fatality, segregation, and social inequality. Chapter 3 analyzes Ed Ruscha’s photographic series related to driving and the roadside, including Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1962 and Royal Road Test, 1967. The chapter also looks at Lee Friedlander’s photographs taken on the road into the mid-1970s. Although both were indebted to the earlier tradition of Evans and Frank, Ruscha and Friedlander took different directions, representing two sets of artistic values and photographic approaches. Ruscha manifested the Pop art and Conceptualist affinity, while Friedlander exemplified the snapshot yet sophisticated formalist style. Chapter 4 reexamines road photographs of the 1970s and 1980s with emphasis on two road trip series by Stephen Shore. The first, American Surfaces, 1972 demonstrates an affinity of Pop art and Frank’s snapshot. Shore’s Uncommon Places, 1982, regenerates the formalist and analytical view exemplified by Evans with a large 8-by-10 camera. Shore’s work not only illustrates the emergence of color photography in the art world but also reconsiders the transformation of the American landscape, particularly evidenced in the seminal exhibition titled New Topographics: A Man-Altered Landscape, 1975. I also compare Shore’s work with the ones by his contemporaries, such as Robert Adams, William Eggleston, and Joel Sternfeld, to demonstrate how their images share common ground but translate nuanced agendas respectively. By reintroducing both Evans’s and Frank’s legacies in his work, Shore more consciously engaged with this photographic road trip tradition. Chapter 5 investigates a selection of photographic series from 1990 to the present to revisit the ways in which the symbolism of the road evolves, as well as how artists represent the driving and roadscapes. These are evident in such works as Catherine Opie’s Freeway Series, 1994–1995; Andrew Bush’s Vector Portraits, 1989–1997; Martha Rosler’s The Rights of Passage, 1995; and Amy Stein’s Stranded, 2010. Furthermore, since the late 1990s, Friedlander developed a series titled America by Car, 2010, incorporating the driving vision taken from the inside seat of a car. His idiosyncratic inclusion of the side-view mirror, reflections, and self-presence is a consistent theme throughout his career, embodying a multilayered sense of time and place: the past, present, and future, as well as the inside space and outside world of a car. Works by artists listed above exemplify that road photography is a complex and ongoing interaction of observation, imagination, and intention. Photographers continue to re-enact and reformulate the photographic tradition of the American road trip. / Art History