Chance and the found object set the stage for artworks that illustrate the clash between the everyman, popular culture and high art. The investigation of my process, surroundings and interests leads to an infinite amount of possibilities in a process that is beginning to eat itself.

This thesis aims to facilitate a broader understanding of post-revolutionary Iranian filmmaking, by way of an analysis of the New Iranian Cinema and Iranian cinema in exile and diaspora, and the various relationships between these two cinemas. Thus far no significant attempt has been made to consider these two cinemas in relation to each other. This thesis therefore represents a significant contribution to this line of research. Along the way it addresses several key concepts of long-standing importance in film studies, such as notions of art cinema, authorship and national cinema, in particular how such concepts have been used as a means of studying the New Iranian Cinema. Exilic and diasporic Iranian filmmaking represents a challenge to traditional understandings of these concepts. The first chapter therefore examines how the New Iranian Cinema has been received and constructed as an archetypal 'art cinema' in Europe and North America, in addition to how this cinema invites, at the same time as it resists, such interpretations. Thereafter follows a consideration of Iranian emigre filmmaking across Europe and North America, and how it has changed over the past thirty years, gradually shifting from an exclusively exilic to a pan-diasporic outlook. Chapters three and four are individual case studies of Iranian emigre filmmakers Amir Naderi and Sohrab Shahid Saless respectively. As two of Iran's most important and influential pre-revolutionary filmmakers, the works of Naderi and Saless represent not only interesting divergences from the evolutionary understanding of Iranian emigre cinema outlined in the second chapter, but also form two of the most compelling links between the New Iranian Cinema, and it exilic and diasporic counterpart. This thesis concludes by arguing for a more flexible and open-ended conception of national cinema more generally, as well as more comprehensive, nuanced and deterritorialised understanding of post-revolutionary Iranian filmmaking.

Memories are experiences that are removed from our present time and space. The images I create are also removed; they are of a specific time and place, an instant or series of instances captured. The work I have produced in this program is an amalgamation of two artistic media, photography and paint. I choose to layer images to emphasize the complexity of experiences and to illustrate a sense of time. The combination of a mechanical and a handmade object emphasizes the intricacy of our experiences. What is revealed is a combination of color and image that creates multiple compositions within the whole. Layering paint with photography and sculpture allows me to continue to experiment and explore the variety of media that I find most interesting. I draw inspiration from many artists including Jackson Pollack, Willem DeKooning, Richard Diebenkorn, the Starn Twins, David Hockney and Frida Kahlo.These influences and my own interpretations are what makes my work my own.

BEHIND THE FIRE LINEA thesis submitted in partial fulfillment for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University, 2004. Major Director: Jim Long, Department Chair. Behind the Line of Fire is a documentary of the professional lives of a group of firefighters. Inspired by the events of September 11th, it has been an ongoing journey for me as I continue to interact with an photograph these individuals doing the job that they live for. My goal for this project has been to work within the guidelines of a documentary, a genre that has a rich, diverse, and defined history. I did not want to show scenes in which firefighters were depicted in typically iconographic scenarios. I have not made any images to date representing exploding structures with firefighters risking life and limb fighting the fire, nor have I shown the firefighters performing heroic acts such as rescuing a child or an animal. I believe the imagery I have created presents firefighters in a different light. These are men and women working. There are no hidden meanings or agendas involved. The photos are to be taken at face value as images of people whose lives revolve around what they do.

The thesis exhibit installed at VCU's Anderson Gallery was carried out using still imagery (a photograph), moving imagery (recorded video, live video), constructed objects and a delineated space. It was an experiment dealing with how one comes to know the world by virtue of one's physical activity within it. It was most importantly a work that required the viewer's participation in order to become "complete".

Since childhood, my passion to create has driven me to search for the simplest truths within the world I live in. Throwbacks of pop culture have always decorated my life and their influences are directly reflected in my work. The nightly news, advertisements, pulp magazines, film, and music all play an extremely important role in my work as each influence becomes a layer of spirit and emotion in my mixed media paintings and photography. It’s those ordinary and mundane gifts that I find in each normal day that spill the truth and the essence of my life into my art. Popular culture has always filled my life with vivacity, passion, and a yearning for creativity. Admittedly, I’ve long been an artist that gets lost in the contemporary message of my work. I do after all own it and somewhere in my creative mind the process of creation and the object as art become my unified gospel in a sacred delivery and message. I absorb my surroundings, dissect it, rearrange it, and spit it back out to the world as a reinterpretation of the original, and on occasion transform it into something totally original within itself.

This dissertation analyzes Life’s early coverage of the Cold War (1945-1954) in order to explicate this publication’s creation and reinforcement of prescriptive attitudes about this ideological engagement through photographically illustrated news. By uncovering Life’s editorial approach this project proposes a new diagnostic for evaluating documentary images by re-configuring Hayden White’s incisive theory of emplotment—the process of engendering historical narratives with meaning— through semiotic models proposed by Louis Hjelmslev and Roland Barthes, thereby offering a useful tool for future scholars to re-examine modern media’s transition towards prizing visual immediacy over critical engagement. Life’s editors’ link narrative devices and rhetoric with photographs to make these images appear as first-hand experience and function as objective conclusions. Life characterizes the Cold War as an epic moral struggle between the US and USSR, and its 1943 special issue on Russia acts as the comedic prologue to this narrative by distinguishing these ideologically disparate wartime allies. After post-war agreements fail, this congenial atmosphere swiftly transitions into another battle between democracy and tyranny, defined through literary conventions. Life employs synecdoche and allegory to encode photographs of individuals as icons of valorous populations (Americans and Eastern Europeans) and to symbolize concepts (democracy and charity). Metonymy and irony transform photographs into direct signs of Communism and visual evidence of its degeneracy. Life’s comic presentation of Marshal Josip Tito contrasts with its satiric coverage of Senator Joseph McCarthy to direct readers’ attention towards the best and worst possible courses of action regarding the Communist menace, at home and abroad.

This thesis reviews the background, influences, and evolution of the body of work entitled Folia, which forms the basis for the candidate's thesis exhibition. It traces the development of the candidate's artistic inclinations from drawing to photography. Directorial and Pictorialist photography are discussed as forebears in the Influences chapter. Evolution of the Body of Work details how the current work grew from both the candidate's background and influences. A Brief Anthology of Quotations references Susan Sontag's influential work, On Photography, with quotations that have either influenced the candidate's work or reflect his perceptions of art and life. The balance of the thesis describes the candidate's working process in creating the work, and the installation at VCU's Anderson Gallery.

I prefer to make my work specifically for an exhibition about a place. I'll spend days, sometimes months, exploring this place without preconceptions - walking the roads or trails or fields, falling in love with aspects of the landscape, considering questions the place suggests before I begin to contemplate how to make them into images. The actual making of images helps me to refine thought that is often elusive, contradictory, or enigmatic. Each pinhole photograph, painting, sketchbook, found object, sculpture, or drawing provides its own tools for reflection. Over time, these processes form hundreds of images. Some will begin to call themselves together and somehow suggest a new perspective, a cumulative image that reveals something heretofore unseen about this place, even to me. With these new insights in mind, I begin to cull the images, seeking to draft a sense of place, to part out from complexity a body of work that I hope will allow viewers to contemplate a place through the language of its own images.

This thesis tracks the formal and conceptual development of my work during the two years of graduate study at the VCU Photography and Film Department. It describes the influence of photography on my evolution as an artist and contextualizes my desire to expand the practice beyond the traditional limitations of the medium. It recounts my experimentations with assemblage, video and installation and their contribution to my understanding of spatial and temporal dimensions in the formal construction of my work.In part, the thesis is also a statement of my convictions about art making. It discusses theimportance of perception and subjective experience, as well as the role of personal history in my work.