Thesis (M.F.A.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2999-01-01

This work finds curious the relationships of figures bound by and revolving around a central axis. As this series of figures are elaborated by mathematical operations, the complex nature of their combination removes apparent identity and synthesizes a simultaneous presence which is difficult to name. The drawings serve as a form of notation, similar to sheet music. As notation they aim to find their voice in the physical world. The drawings search for relationships which are then made tangible so they can be studied in light and act as a model to continue working. / Master of Architecture

This thesis will explore the causes and consequences of the absence of vernacular photography from museum collections. Through historical analysis of vernacular photography and a close interpretation of a contemporary family snapshot, I will argue that vernacular photographs are important objects of great cultural significance and poignant personal meaning. Photography has always defied categorization. It serves multiple functions and roles, is studied in a vast number of disciplines, and exists in a variety of institutions and collections. Furthermore, it is difficult to classify a single photograph. Vernacular photography thus poses a challenge to museum methods of sorting documents, artifacts, and art. Consequently the photographs that are most significant in everyday life are often missing from the museum setting or are misinterpreted and stripped of their meaning.

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.

'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.

Master of Visual Arts / The Dissertation is a meditation on our relationship with this continent and its layered physical and psychological ‘landscapes’. It explores ways in which artists and writers have depicted our ‘thin’ but evolving presence here in the South, and references my own photographic work. The paper weaves together personal tales with fiction writing and cultural, settler and indigenous history. It identifies a uniquely Australian sense of 21st-century disquiet and argues for some modest aesthetic and social antidotes. It discusses in some detail the suppression of focus in photography, and suggests that the technique evokes not only memory, but a recognition of absence, which invites active participation (as the viewer attempts to ‘place’ and complete the picture). In seeking out special essences of place the paper considers the suburban poetics of painter Clarice Beckett, the rigorous focus-free oeuvre of photographer Uta Barth, and the hybrid vistas of artist/gardener Peter Hutchinson and painter Dale Frank. Interwoven are the insights of contemporary authors Gerald Murnane, W G Sebald and Paul Carter. A speculative chapter about the fluidity of landscape, the interconnectedness of land and sea, and Australia’s ‘deep’ geology fuses indigenous spirituality, oceanic imaginings of Australia, the sinuous bush-scapes of Patrick White, and the poetics of surfing. Full immersion is recommended.

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.

Master of Visual Arts / The Dissertation is a meditation on our relationship with this continent and its layered physical and psychological ‘landscapes’. It explores ways in which artists and writers have depicted our ‘thin’ but evolving presence here in the South, and references my own photographic work. The paper weaves together personal tales with fiction writing and cultural, settler and indigenous history. It identifies a uniquely Australian sense of 21st-century disquiet and argues for some modest aesthetic and social antidotes. It discusses in some detail the suppression of focus in photography, and suggests that the technique evokes not only memory, but a recognition of absence, which invites active participation (as the viewer attempts to ‘place’ and complete the picture). In seeking out special essences of place the paper considers the suburban poetics of painter Clarice Beckett, the rigorous focus-free oeuvre of photographer Uta Barth, and the hybrid vistas of artist/gardener Peter Hutchinson and painter Dale Frank. Interwoven are the insights of contemporary authors Gerald Murnane, W G Sebald and Paul Carter. A speculative chapter about the fluidity of landscape, the interconnectedness of land and sea, and Australia’s ‘deep’ geology fuses indigenous spirituality, oceanic imaginings of Australia, the sinuous bush-scapes of Patrick White, and the poetics of surfing. Full immersion is recommended.

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)."

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF INFORMATICS AND DESIGN OF THE CAPE PENINSULA UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY IN FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MAGISTER TECHNOLOGIAE PHOTOGRAPHY CAPE PENINSULA UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY 2013 / This study deals with the pitfalls and standards associated with the digitisation of photographic artefacts in formal collections. The popularity of the digital medium caused a rapid increase in the demand for converting images into digital files. The need for equipment capable of executing the task successfully, the pressure on collection managers to display their collections to the world and the demand for knowledge needed by managers and operators created pressure to perform optimally and often in great haste. As a result of the rush to create digital image files to be displayed and to be preserved, the decisions that are being made may be questionable. The best choice of file formats for longevity, setting and maintaining standards to guarantee quality digital files and consultation with experts in the field of digitisation as well as attention to best practices are important aspects which must be considered. In order to determine the state of affairs in countries with an advanced knowledge and experience in the field of digitisation, a comprehensive literature study was done. It was found that enough information exists to enable collection managers in South Africa to make well informed decisions to ensure a high quality of digital collection. By means of questionnaires, a survey was undertaken amongst selected Western Cape image preservation institutions to determine the level of knowledge of the managers who are required to make informed decisions. The questionnaire was designed to give insight into choices being made regarding the technical quality, workflow and best practice aspects of digitisation. Comparing the outcome of the questionnaires with best practices and recommended standards in countries with an advanced level of experience it was found that not enough of this experience and knowledge is used by local collection managers although readily available. In some cases standards are disregarded completely. The study also investigated by means of questionnaires the perception of the digital preservation of image files by fulltime photographic students and volunteer members of the Photographic Society of South Africa. It was found that uncertainty exist within both groups with regard to file longevity and access to files in five to ten year's time. Digitisation standards are set and maintained by the use of specially designed targets which enable digitising managers to maintain control over the quality of the digital content as well as monitoring of equipment performance. The use of these targets to set standards were investigated and found to be an accurate and easy method of maintaining control over the standard and quality of digital files. Suppliers of digitising equipment very often market their equipment as being of a high quality and being able to fulfil the required digitisation tasks. Testing selected digitising equipment by means of specially designed targets proved however that potential buyers of equipment in the high cost range should be very cautious about suppliers' claims without proof of performance. Using targets to verify performance should be a routine check before any purchase. The study concludes with recommendations of implementing standards and it points to potential future research.