Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 254-270). Also available on the Internet.

Anthony Cohen, in The Symbolic Construction of Community, writes: "the symbolic expression of community and its boundaries increases in importance as the actual geo-social boundaries of the community are undermined, blurred or otherwise weakened." As Japanese-Canadians were uprooted from familiar communities throughout British Columbia and overwhelmed with the loss of those closest to them, photography was employed to recentre themselves within a stable, yet somewhat imaginative, network of relations. Looking became an act of imaginative exchange with the subject - conflating the act of seeing with the act of knowing. Photographs became "the most cherished possession" at a time when all else familiar had been lost. It is my contention that domestic photographs and albums produced at this time worked to construct, preserve and contain the visual and imaginative narrative of cohesive family stability and communal belonging, despite divisive political differences, disparate geographical living situations, and elapsed family traditions. While acknowledging that photographs construct and embody a multiplicity of meanings, I am interested in the ways Japanese- Canadian albums were employed during the internment to foster a sense of place while internees existed in a liminal or transitional, marginal space. These representations attempt (and of course sometimes fail) to authenticate a seemingly cohesive biography. Declarations of positive experiences abound throughout the seven family albums I address in this project. Yet there is a double nature to these affirmations. Inscribing "happy times" or "joy" alludes to the silent binary of sadness that is effaced from the images. Representations of state surveillance and poor living conditions are virtually never included but did nonetheless exist. It is not my intention, however, to suggest that photographs are entirely deceptive anymore than they are undeniable truths. Rather, I want to argue that the production, organization and narration of photographs enabled internees to resist being subsumed by fears of persecution and obliteration. The intersection of the photographic image with the viewer constructs a narrative of stability, potentially resulting in a positive experience. Inscribing a positive identity onto images of one's body plays a role in the production of contentment: it is an act which simultaneously elides present troubles and safeguards fond memories for the future, it is a conscious and unconscious maneuver constituting one's personal history. Thus the images not only reinforce a positive experience, but also participate in creating one. It is only when anxieties cannot be contained that representation breaks down. "Intimate Archives" seeks to situate domestic photographs of Japanese-Canadians during the 1942- 1949 exile as intersecting with historical crisis and subjective narrative, tracing the possibilities of meaning for both the depicted subjects and the possessor of the images.

Anthony Cohen, in The Symbolic Construction of Community, writes: "the symbolic expression of community and its boundaries increases in importance as the actual geo-social boundaries of the community are undermined, blurred or otherwise weakened." As Japanese-Canadians were uprooted from familiar communities throughout British Columbia and overwhelmed with the loss of those closest to them, photography was employed to recentre themselves within a stable, yet somewhat imaginative, network of relations. Looking became an act of imaginative exchange with the subject - conflating the act of seeing with the act of knowing. Photographs became "the most cherished possession" at a time when all else familiar had been lost. It is my contention that domestic photographs and albums produced at this time worked to construct, preserve and contain the visual and imaginative narrative of cohesive family stability and communal belonging, despite divisive political differences, disparate geographical living situations, and elapsed family traditions. While acknowledging that photographs construct and embody a multiplicity of meanings, I am interested in the ways Japanese- Canadian albums were employed during the internment to foster a sense of place while internees existed in a liminal or transitional, marginal space. These representations attempt (and of course sometimes fail) to authenticate a seemingly cohesive biography. Declarations of positive experiences abound throughout the seven family albums I address in this project. Yet there is a double nature to these affirmations. Inscribing "happy times" or "joy" alludes to the silent binary of sadness that is effaced from the images. Representations of state surveillance and poor living conditions are virtually never included but did nonetheless exist. It is not my intention, however, to suggest that photographs are entirely deceptive anymore than they are undeniable truths. Rather, I want to argue that the production, organization and narration of photographs enabled internees to resist being subsumed by fears of persecution and obliteration. The intersection of the photographic image with the viewer constructs a narrative of stability, potentially resulting in a positive experience. Inscribing a positive identity onto images of one's body plays a role in the production of contentment: it is an act which simultaneously elides present troubles and safeguards fond memories for the future, it is a conscious and unconscious maneuver constituting one's personal history. Thus the images not only reinforce a positive experience, but also participate in creating one. It is only when anxieties cannot be contained that representation breaks down. "Intimate Archives" seeks to situate domestic photographs of Japanese-Canadians during the 1942- 1949 exile as intersecting with historical crisis and subjective narrative, tracing the possibilities of meaning for both the depicted subjects and the possessor of the images. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

The album of Nellie Letitia Mooney McClung (1873-1951) is housed in the British Columbia Archives' Visual Records and is the only photographic album in the McClung Papers. This thesis proposes to contextualize the album within women's photographic history in general, and McClung's photographic practice in particular. The following points will be argued: first, photo albums are complex socio-historical documents which provide insight into gender and class constructions; second, late nineteenth and early twentieth century album-making was considered a female pursuit linked to the domestic sphere; third, the Nellie McClung album dates primarily from 1896-1911, the years McClung lived with her husband, Wesley, and children in Manitou, Manitoba; and fourth, I propose that a number of the album's photos are not only private mementos, but also public documents, having been used or considered as illustrations and advertisements for works written by or about Nellie McClung in these years. / Graduate / 0377 / 0334

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Department of Art History, June 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

The compilation of albums began almost upon the invention of photography and has continued to this day, migrating now into the realms of electronic and digital imagery. The private album, which includes, but is not limited to, the family album, is a hybrid of flexibility and conservatism--situational, syncretic and personal in its contents and organization. Interpretation of an album is correspondingly challenging, especially when the album has been separated from its compiler and placed in a public collection. / The McCord Museum of Canadian History has a substantial collection of private albums ranging in date from the 1860s to the 1960s. The collection has been assembled mainly from private donations as a reflection of Canadian social history. Aside from its breadth, the collection offers the researcher a degree of assurance that the albums represent the work of amateur compilers. Bringing this collection to light and raising the museum's consciousness of the value of these objects as albums have been important aspects of this study. / The primary focus, however, has been the discovery of an interpretational framework, a way of reconstituting the intentions and methods of the compiler. Albums have been interpreted as visual equivalents of analogous forms, such as journals or Family Bibles, but these categories fail to contain the full nature of compilatory expression which is often multiplistic, redundant, serpentine and obscure. The private album transferred to the public institution needs to be considered in the full context of its creation and presentation--the merging of visual and oral traditions. / A multidisciplinary review of the literature outlines the paradigms and metaphors that inflect our understanding of photographic albums as tools of communication and sources for artists. The function of the album as an aide-memoire for individual life history has long been recognized, but the detailed application of orality's condition and structure to the photographic album is here an original contribution to knowledge. The reconciliation of photography and orality expands our understanding of both and restores the heuristic conversation that brought the photographic album into being.

No description available.

Lu Yang. / Thesis submitted in: November 2004. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 96-103). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgement --- p.iv / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Motivation --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Our Contributions --- p.3 / Chapter 1.3 --- Thesis Outline --- p.5 / Chapter 2 --- Background Study --- p.7 / Chapter 2.1 --- MPEG-7 Introduction --- p.8 / Chapter 2.2 --- Image Analysis in CBIR Systems --- p.11 / Chapter 2.2.1 --- Color Information --- p.13 / Chapter 2.2.2 --- Color Layout --- p.19 / Chapter 2.2.3 --- Texture Information --- p.20 / Chapter 2.2.4 --- Shape Information --- p.24 / Chapter 2.2.5 --- CBIR Systems --- p.26 / Chapter 2.3 --- Image Processing in JPEG Frequency Domain --- p.30 / Chapter 2.4 --- Photo Album Clustering --- p.33 / Chapter 3 --- Feature Extraction and Similarity Analysis --- p.38 / Chapter 3.1 --- Feature Set in Frequency Domain --- p.38 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- JPEG Frequency Data --- p.39 / Chapter 3.1.2 --- Our Feature Set --- p.42 / Chapter 3.2 --- Digital Photo Similarity Analysis --- p.43 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Energy Histogram --- p.43 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Photo Distance --- p.45 / Chapter 4 --- 1-Dimensional Photo Album Management Techniques --- p.49 / Chapter 4.1 --- Photo Album Sorting --- p.50 / Chapter 4.2 --- Photo Album Clustering --- p.52 / Chapter 4.3 --- Photo Album Compression --- p.56 / Chapter 4.3.1 --- Variable IBP frames --- p.56 / Chapter 4.3.2 --- Adaptive Search Window --- p.57 / Chapter 4.3.3 --- Compression Flow --- p.59 / Chapter 4.4 --- Experiments and Performance Evaluations --- p.60 / Chapter 5 --- High Dimensional Photo Clustering --- p.67 / Chapter 5.1 --- Traditional Clustering Techniques --- p.67 / Chapter 5.1.1 --- Hierarchical Clustering --- p.68 / Chapter 5.1.2 --- Traditional K-means --- p.71 / Chapter 5.2 --- Multidimensional Scaling --- p.74 / Chapter 5.2.1 --- Introduction --- p.75 / Chapter 5.2.2 --- Classical Scaling --- p.77 / Chapter 5.3 --- Our Interactive MDS-based Clustering --- p.80 / Chapter 5.3.1 --- Principal Coordinates from MDS --- p.81 / Chapter 5.3.2 --- Clustering Scheme --- p.82 / Chapter 5.3.3 --- Layout Scheme --- p.84 / Chapter 5.4 --- Experiments and Results --- p.87 / Chapter 6 --- Conclusions --- p.94 / Bibliography --- p.96

This dissertation studies a quiet but enormous cultural phenomenon that arose in the Soviet Union during the difficult years following World War II: amateur family photography. In the wake of enormous trauma and deprivation, millions of Soviet citizens picked up cameras and began to create images of their lives and environments. In doing so, I argue, they participated in a global trend in a specifically Soviet way. This project begins by establishing the rise of a domestic camera industry, which was the production base that allowed for the massive growth of Soviet amateur photography. Next, I examine how official cultural and economic institutions encouraged, discouraged, and reacted to the rising population of photographers. I then pivot to the work of amateur photographers themselves, exploring their self-representation through three vantage points. First, I trace some of the first mass Soviet amateur photographers: Red Army soldiers. Next, I examine family snapshot photography in Soviet Russia from 1945 to 1956. Finally, I focus on the personal photography of Russian and ex-Soviet displaced persons camps in Germany following the war. Through these three perspectives, I argue that Soviet and ex-Soviet amateur photographers created a new, unique visual language, interpreting their lives through their cameras. This dissertation seeks to answer two main questions. First, why did the Soviet state, in the wake of World War II and amid widespread shortage and famine, consistently expand camera supply and fuel a boom in amateur photography? Second, what sorts of photos did Soviet amateur photographers take, and how can they deepen our understanding of post-war Soviet culture? I argue that the Soviet state invested in cameras initially as a military technology, with the camera evolving into a consumer good over the course of the war and its aftermath. With their new cameras in hand, amateur photographers took photographs much like their international counterparts, highlighting their private lives and using common visual cliches to stage and set individuals as the focus of their images.

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.