Photography was my introduction into art. I gravitated toward portrait photography fairly quickly. I found the interaction between subject and photographer to be an intense moment in time. I began to push that intensity - through various non-traditional approaches, such as placing ads in the personals. It did not take long before I turned the camera on myself, creating self-portraits in the domestic setting. I began to play for the camera. I created various personas that placed myself in some gray area between masculinity and femininity. Shortly there after, I began working with collage. I found the formulas and rigidity sometimes found in photography had me gasping for air. Collage works had freed up my process. The mediums of photography and collage played harmoniously together as they are both paired in ideas of domesticity, gender roles, ' family dynamics and dominant and submissive figures. The collage work is compressed and stacked in a way that adds weight to the issues found inside. The stacking and overlapping of the collages, keeps all the elements fighting for space. I can tap into the subconscious and explore ideas through the re-contextualization of other images, text, and scraps of paper. The key elements of my domestic photo collages are: the home, sexual tension/hierarchy /innuendo, and gender play. Through a serious studio practice, I am able to share my sense of humor and playfulness in my work. With an Exactoknife, a few pages from a magazine, and a glue stick, I can change and rearrange the world around me.

I am an excremental artist. I do not mean an artist who works with feces or is interested in manure but one whose artwork is expelled through the results of process. As a photographer, I am not as interested in indexing a location, a person or a moment as I am dissolving the structure of photography through the manipulation of photographic materials. I typically photograph landscapes that catch my attention for a myriad of reasons. The commonality between these images is anonymity of place. Hints of location are always present but never accentuated, instead their purpose is akin to a forging slug: raw blank material from which my artwork will be created. My photographic slugs are then entered into various processing systems that I have devised over the years. Common processing techniques that I incorporate include hand and machine stitching, chemically altering photographic paper and the integration of open-source electronics. These and other processes are mixed, matched and blended to form the corpus of my work. The body of my work is not complete without my head, heart and hands. My intellectual interests are constantly feeding the physical processes described above. I have an extended engagement with photography’s rich history along with a critical commitment to philosophy. My intuition is permitted to work in concert with my intellect despite stark contrasts between the two. My intellect looks for structures and speaks in logical thought while my intuition arrives in waves of unarticulated emotions and ‘gut feelings’. The heart’s language is often more difficult to translate than intellectual headband but both are equally valuable in my process. Finally, my hands play a vital role in creating my art. They transcribe the conversation between the head and the heart and physically complete the processes defined prior. My artwork is not conceived and the built into a structure, instead it is a result of the passing through a system. I consume copious amounts of stimuli (intellectually, visually, emotionally) and digest it through my creative process and the result is my artwork.

This publication is the companion piece to “This Must Be the Place,” a 3D realization of my conceptual photography work exhibited in the Anderson Courtyard at VCU's 2019 School of the Arts MFA Show. I photograph scenes from nature and reproduce these images onto flattened plexiglass planes, arranging them in new, natural environments and photographing them again. The outcome is a scenic collage in which two unfamiliar locations become superimposed. It is my hope that as people experience the work they become a part of the texture of it.

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.

behold, be still illuminates my predilection, that of a portrait photographer, which is driven by a fascination with viewing and collecting the ‘other’, the male, now extending into this suite of still moving portraits. Through this act and in my art practice, I uncover the vulnerabilities, both for myself and for my subjects, as they are offered for scrutiny on screen to become ‘public’, unlike their previous position in my photographic archive, which is private. I reveal for the first time my pathology in the drive to collect surrogates and stand-ins, to console the loss and give solace for the absence of one- revealing a latent scopophilia. Photography histories, specifically portraiture, and the moving image are discussed, focusing on the binaries of the medium/s, their reflective and reflexive qualities, and their inherent ability to reveal and conceal. My visual inquiry is an expansion to experiencing the portrait by presenting the sitters as close to ‘themselves’ via the medium of high definition video portraits. I expel the implications of women looking at men, and review the work of both significant and historical feminine influences and contemporary women artists positioned and working in this territory and who employ both film and photography. I highlight Victorian women and the melancholic age, where photography is deeply embedded, tracing the origins and lineage to my current work. I seek to define and locate the notion of a beautiful masculine, investigating what it is to view, receive, and collect between the axis of photography and video via the intimate exchange and operatives of my gendered and privileged gaze. The success is determined by the tension between these two machines and resulting portraits, as the act in sitting for a portrait with the technology of today, renders a more ‘accurate’ portrayal. From this the moving portrait completes the desire and an opportunity to obtain and possess the beloved after their absence. Crucial issues become apparent as I examine the imprint of the real in the photograph, the camera as a surrogate for myself, and the passive yet consensual subject.

We enhance photographs shot in dark environments by combining a picture taken with the available light and one taken with the flash. We preserve the ambiance of the original lighting and insert the sharpness from the flash image. We use the bilateral filter to decompose the images into detail and large scale. We reconstruct the image using the large scale of the available lighting and the detail of the flash. We detect and correct flash shadows. This combines the advantages of available illumination and flash photography. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

This thesis presents a photography curriculum for a beginning high school level photography class. It is designed as a teaching guide to structure a photography class that incorporates both film photography and digital photographic technology. One of the biggest challenges for teachers of photography is how to structure a curriculum with a limited number of enlargers and space in the darkroom, while incorporating digital technology with limited computer access for students. The curriculum presented here includes three major parts: a traditional photographic film component, a digital photography component, and a concepts component where students will experiment with different photographic techniques of manipulation as well as tackle photographic history, criticism, and visual literacy.

The emergence of digital capture and editing technologies make providing a more detailed and coherent description of the experiences depicted in photos possible. Through the combination of photos, music and voice, people can compose digital stories of their life experiences. However, communicating an experience using photos to people who do not share the experience, and are not co-located is a difficult endeavor, even with effective digital editing tools. In this dissertation, I studied the online photo communication challenges that have arisen as a result of the transition from film to digital photography. I detail my studies of consumer desires and barriers related to online photo communication. Also, I present the design and user evaluation of the Storytellr system, which addresses those desires and barriers. The Storytellr system integrates storytelling activities with traditional photo activities to reduce the challenges of online photo communication. Through this work I contribute to the understanding of the challenges encountered by consumers who desire to engage in sharing life stories through photos over distance. I also contribute a method - integrating storytelling activities into photo activities - for enabling people to overcome those challenges using a process they find satisfying, and that produces an outcome that satisfies authors and viewers alike.

I position my work at the intersections of identity and form. More specifically, I’m interested in how and why an individual’s physical appearance and demeanor become communicative and are then interpreted. Socially, it seems that we still often operate in ways that honor categorical distinctions between people, meaning for instance, that a man is something and a woman is something different from a man. Well, what if a woman can become a man or be read as a man simply by a change of clothes or through the addition of simple hormone injections? If this is possible, what does it mean for the terms that were previously understood to be fairly stable? Why does my body mean something or have to mean something, and if it doesn’t have meaning, what is it that it conveys? I live in a body that has shifted from something that was labeled female at birth to something that is now read as male. This adjustment has radically undermined my relationship to the blunt categorical expectations that partition the social face of our psychic lives. I’m unconvinced that the interpretation of my self is generally concurrent with the interpretation of my form. Too often, I believe the latter restricts the potential of the former. This is particularly evident in my unique position as a practically unreadable gender. My physical cues point to a familiar position within the gender binary that I don’t identify with. This limits my ability to engage with even members of my own queer community without resorting to the act of disclosure. I’m also curious about the flip side of this problem when, upon disclosure, the binary’s seam opens to be revealed as faceted, possessing multiple, unnamable spaces that reflect uncertainty back into the ideas of man and woman and render gender into a flexible field of characteristics that individuals use for many things, as opposed to simply inhabit. My work addresses this potential break between font and legibility, gesture and etiquette, the familiar and the possible. My portrait of the body and gender is incidental not substantive. / text

The Berlin photographer Marta Astfalck-Vietz was active in the Weimar Republic, between 1924 and 1936. Her work was re-discovered in 1989 by the curator Janos Frecot, who staged a solo exhibition of her work in the Berlinische Galerie in 1991, and her archive, comprising just over 400 prints, is now held there. Since this show, the work of Marta Astfalck-Vietz has rarely been exhibited. In both German and Anglo-American scholarship it has received sporadic attention; the only text devoted to her work is still the catalogue to Frecot’s 1991 show. This thesis presents her photography to an Anglo-American audience, not as a compensatory exercise in retrieving a forgotten woman artist, but as a contribution to the existing body of literature on women in the Weimar era. Like other female artists of the period, Marta Astfalck-Vietz negotiated between her private experiences of life in the Republic and representations of its social and political tensions, which were circulated in novels, in films, on the stage, and in magazines. Her photographs address the issues of sex gender and race that preoccupy historians of Weimar Germany, confirming, confounding, and expanding our knowledge of the era.