The primary aim of this project is getting a complete understanding of photography’s development process and looking into future, user-centered innovations. Digital evolution changed the rules of product design. Products became a part of a complex system, consisting of a variety of different touch-points which also constantly extend. Photography and cameras are changing. Mobile phones, wireless connections and sharing platforms have a big impact on photography. Everything is getting connected to each other, both people and devices. How will digital photography adapt to this new world? How will people change their perception of images? Is it possible to design a camera considering all other systems around it? While designing a highly technological device, how can user-perspective be included in the design process?

Mass transit in the form of light rail is, in many ways, a new and revolutionary idea for the Greater Los Angeles Area. Although mass light rail transit did exist in Los Angeles in the form of the Pacific Electric Railways red car system, an extensive network of metro rail lines has never existed in Los Angeles County since Pacific Electric was dismantled and shut down in 1950. Because of this, the popular mode of transport in LA County has traditionally been cars, and public transport has consisted mostly of bus routes. This has all changed in the last few decades. Since the 1980s, LA County has conducted several studies and, as a result of those studies, has proposed to build an extensive network of light rail lines to connect the county. In more recent years, many of these project plans have been approved, and the MTA has overseen the construction and functioning of new railway lines that are connecting far-flung regions of LA County with Union Station in downtown LA. Currently, the MTA operates 5 light rail lines within LA county-the Blue Line, the Red Line, the Purple Line, the Green Line and the Gold Line-that extend north, south and east of downtown LA. Each of these lines has been functional for a varying amount of time, but current weekday ridership on this system of lines has crossed the 280,000 mark as off September 2009.

We, as human beings, are unique creatures that have a need to form places. This obsession with claiming spaces and turning them into places starts at a young age. Maybe it is the first time a child goes to the park and claims a corner of the sand pit, because they think the sand is better on the right side. Perhaps it is a specific seat in the bleachers a person sits in at every home football game. Or maybe it is much more significant, like the spot on the path by the curved tree, next to the bike shed where you said good-bye to your family the first day of your freshman year in college.

My senior thesis deals with contemporary depictions of sexualized violence against women in fashion photography. Images of bloodied, bruised, and dead-looking models have proliferated in fashion magazine editorials and advertisements since the 1970s and I want to explore why sexualized violence is seen as sexy and compelling advertising, in light of the fact that domestic violence is the greatest cause of injury to women in America. I produced my own fashion photographs in locations of actual female homicides in Los Angeles County, particularly those nearest to Claremont, with the use of The Los Angeles Times online homicide database, which pinpoints every homicide reported in L.A. County since 2007. We live in a world plagued by violence and by creating my own violent, fashion photographs in actual homicide locations, I hoped to jar the viewer out of neutrality and expose violent advertisements and editorials for what they are: objectifying, exploitative, and perverse expressions of hostility against women. The images abuse and demean commercial speech privileges and glamorize and trivialize horrific, actual experiences of violence suffered by countless women.

Artists' book utilizing cross disciplinary media.

Communist Stardom in the Cold War: Josip Broz Tito in Western and Yugoslav Photography, 1943-1980 Nikolina Kurtovic Doctor of Philosophy Department of Art University of Toronto 2010 Abstract This dissertation examines the iconographic and ideological aspects of the public image of Josip Broz Tito, the communist leader of Socialist Yugoslavia and one of the major historical personalities of the twentieth century. By studying the specific historical, political, and cultural contexts of Tito’s changing iconography between 1943 and 1980, I considers a dynamic relationship between the Western and Eastern perspectives on his leadership style, personality, and role, as communicated in the idiom of Western photojournalism and celebrity photography, as well as the style of official presidential photography in Yugoslavia. I analyze photo-essays on Tito published in Life, Time, and Picture Post, and in the official Yugoslav magazines, Yugoslavia and Yugoslav Review, as well as his portraits by Yousuf Karsh and by Ivo Eterovic in his photo-book Tito’s Private Life. I engage the issues of image reception by studying fundamental stereotypes within the canon of Tito photography, exploring their relation to the popular and political discourses on war heroism, resistance myth, masculinity, leadership, communism, disease, romance, family, leisure and celebrity in the U.S. during World War Two and the Cold War. Tito’s photographs are compared with relevant examples in modern portrait photography, photojournalism, and European painting, thereby situating Tito’s example in the tradition of Western political image making, but also in relation to local traditions. My dissertation shows that the practical role of the cult of Tito in the American press during the Cold War was to render him and Yugoslavia as examples for the satellite countries, and to enlist popular support for U.S. policy. It also helped Tito navigate a political crisis following his 1948 break with Stalin. The iconography created in this context contributed to the genesis and modernizing of Yugoslav presidential photography in the 1950s. Appropriating the rhetoric and formal devices of Western celebrity and glamour photography, Yugoslav photographs created a set of presidential stereotypes and their photographs were bearers of the conventional narrative of Tito’s presidency in Yugoslav magazines and books addressing Western audiences between 1960 and 1980. My dissertation underscores the role of cross-cultural contacts and contexts for developing, maintaining, and understanding of Tito’s publicity and celebrity in the West.

Life is to be lived, savoured and engaged. Photography gives us permission to do that – to stop and simply look at something. As we hurry on with our day, it says, “Wait - over there! Look at that! Look how great that is!” If we stop to consider what we see, the looking may help restore our appreciation for the world around us. Photography, at its beginning, struggled with category; was it science or art, or was it something else? Once named photography – writing with light – we could place the craft among familiar practices of inscription such as writing and drawing. Unlike drawing and other forms of representation, however, as a trace photography constructs a direct and necessary relationship with its referent (its ostensible subject, if you will), creating a new set of questions and experiences. This condition is key to photography’s power, and the reason photography is a principle tool in modern-day story telling, and the culture of information. Why do we take pictures? What is it about photographs that intrigues and seduces us? What does photography have to offer architecture? Each time we take a picture we create a duplicate of experience, a duplicate that will exist unchanged. We create a second stream of existence for ourselves and immortalize a part of us. By doing so, we also give ourselves the opportunity and permission to return to that moment, and all that we associate with it, and to experience it again. The photographs we take and the photographs we see influence our experience. Photographic life is not found within the chaos of the world. It resides in fragments, millions of them, framed, cut off from any context. These pictures present us with evidence of moments, places and events. With them we can navigate the world in silence. And while the camera cannot be denied its objectivity, each photographer has a unique position, a developed opinion, and a personal practice; each photographer chooses what to show, and what to deny. Photographers select evidence to share with the world; as viewers we find our own meanings to the photographs that we see. We see texture, pattern, and forms created in light and shadow. We see a rhythm and episode and form we previously overlooked. When a photograph is successful, when there is some coincidence in the common relationship between photographer and viewer, via the photograph, that photograph becomes a site of experience.

South African painter turned photographer, Zwelethu Mthethwa, was born in Durban during Apartheid. In 1980 Mthethwa began taking his photographs in the shanty towns on the outskirts of Cape Town and later took pictures in Mozambique and New Orleans. His work has global significance. Using art and literary theory and criticism, I expand upon the significance of his photographs in the contemporary world. I do “readings” of eight photographs from eight different series of Zwelethu Mthethwa’s work using postcolonial theory, abjection, and cultural studies as theoretical constructs to provide three different angles for interpreting his work.

No description available.

Life is to be lived, savoured and engaged. Photography gives us permission to do that – to stop and simply look at something. As we hurry on with our day, it says, “Wait - over there! Look at that! Look how great that is!” If we stop to consider what we see, the looking may help restore our appreciation for the world around us. Photography, at its beginning, struggled with category; was it science or art, or was it something else? Once named photography – writing with light – we could place the craft among familiar practices of inscription such as writing and drawing. Unlike drawing and other forms of representation, however, as a trace photography constructs a direct and necessary relationship with its referent (its ostensible subject, if you will), creating a new set of questions and experiences. This condition is key to photography’s power, and the reason photography is a principle tool in modern-day story telling, and the culture of information. Why do we take pictures? What is it about photographs that intrigues and seduces us? What does photography have to offer architecture? Each time we take a picture we create a duplicate of experience, a duplicate that will exist unchanged. We create a second stream of existence for ourselves and immortalize a part of us. By doing so, we also give ourselves the opportunity and permission to return to that moment, and all that we associate with it, and to experience it again. The photographs we take and the photographs we see influence our experience. Photographic life is not found within the chaos of the world. It resides in fragments, millions of them, framed, cut off from any context. These pictures present us with evidence of moments, places and events. With them we can navigate the world in silence. And while the camera cannot be denied its objectivity, each photographer has a unique position, a developed opinion, and a personal practice; each photographer chooses what to show, and what to deny. Photographers select evidence to share with the world; as viewers we find our own meanings to the photographs that we see. We see texture, pattern, and forms created in light and shadow. We see a rhythm and episode and form we previously overlooked. When a photograph is successful, when there is some coincidence in the common relationship between photographer and viewer, via the photograph, that photograph becomes a site of experience.