This PhD research project examines the agency of photography and the photographic image. The research develops insights into photography as one of the dominant image making, cultural practices in the Twenty-first Century. Its focus is on digital photography and it begins by understanding agency as distributed, connected and networked: properties predominantly associated with an image that is digital. The intended contribution to knowledge is a philosophical engagement with how images embody notions of representational failure because they present themselves as image in support of a fiction of reality. What this means philosophically, is that there is no access to reality other than through representations that fail to represent. Underpinned by the question as to whether and how “practice interpellates a subject of the signifier” (Burgin, 2011: 196) the research considers the role of photography in helping to determine individuals as viewing subjects. Since photography is the “quintessential practice of life” (Kember & Zylinkska, 2015:07) in which seemingly every moment is recorded, captured and represented, this project investigates how we become who we are through interactions and encounters with photography. I conclude that photographic agency conceals a structure sustained by a form of labour and production that is masked by creativity and enjoyment. The research also provides new ideas towards understanding how technology has shaped perceptual experiences and aligns agency to algorithms and software. Since amateurs and casual image-makers – those “without the spirit of mastery” (Barthes 1977/1975: 52) – are the producers of the majority of images we encounter today, much of the inquiry focused on their experiences. This approach, focusing on the amateur, was also taken within the context of the “massive production of photos in the conduct of everyday life” (Hand, 2012: 02) and the “identifiable increase in image-making as an ordinary aspect of people’s lives” (Ibid: 03). In this sense photography is addressed as a dominant cultural practice. Drawing on the experiences of those who take photographs, the research develops an understanding of an interconnected object of inquiry: photography and the photographic image. Practice contributes two fold to this research. Firstly, as the output of photographic labour, secondly, in the form of my own practice, as a set of responses to the theoretical ideas developed within the project. This research delivers a refined theory of photographic agency. It proposes, through a chain of reasoning, that in photography we do not create likeness of places. Instead, we grasp how unlike places photographs really are and in turn the ground of representation is questioned and repositioned. If photography is not “another visual form of representation, but an immersive economy that offers an entirely new way to inhabit materiality and its relation to bodies, machines and brains” (Rubinstein, 2015), then it is this new, emerging and complex photographic ontology that my project contributes toward.

The thesis explores the post-millennial boom in the production of Catalan films. Previous critical work on Catalan cinema has tended to focus primarily on documentary and realist forms. The research presented here maintains an interest in documentary as a key mode but it also examines historical and fantasy-based feature film production as important aspects of what has been termed the ‘New Catalan Cinema.’ It places a series of Catalan films in the contexts of their production and reception, paying particular attention to developments in audio-visual industries and cultural policy that have taken place since 2000. Through this, the thesis demonstrates that the New Catalan Cinema challenges pre-existing critical conceptualisations of both national and regional film cultures. The main question addressed by the thesis is ‘In what ways has Catalan cinema consolidated a new identity in the 2000s?’. This has involved historical consideration of pre-2000 Catalan film culture. More explicitly, the thesis examines the main institutions that have supported the development of Catalan cinema since 2000, including educational (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Escola Superior de Cinema i Audiovisuals de Catalunya) audiovisual (MEDIA, Acadèmia del Cinema Català, Barcelona/Catalunya Film Commission), governmental (Departament de Cultura, Institució Català d’Empreses Culturals) and cultural (Institut Ramon Llull). Additionally, it presents case study analyses of documentary, historical drama and horror as important areas within which regional, national and global crossovers and tensions are negotiated.

Paris magazine and its derivatives - Paris Sex Appeal, Pages Folles, Pour lire à deux and Scandale - were published in France from 1931 to around 1939. Academic studies of nudes, candid humanist photographs and pin ups with artistic overtones were juxtaposed in these monthly illustrated magazines. Used by surrealist artists for their collages, they associate photographs by the greatest artists of the time (Brassaï, Kertesz, Man Ray, Germaine Krull) and the works of less famous photographers (Jean Moral,Pierre Boucher, Roger Schall, Nora Dumas ...). Forming a genre yet untapped by historians, these magazines feature both a real taste for erotic fantasies and a remarkable sophistication in composition and conception. They are to be inscribed in the context of the interwar years which they reflect through a bawdy style, audacious and multifaceted aesthetics - from kitsch to modernism - and a permeability to technological reproducibility. This project proposes to draw a panorama of the 1930s and of its underside through the study of a material which is at the crossroads of the history of photography, ideas of the body and the question of artistic appropriation. The magazines are to be dissected as indicative of the ambivalent emancipation of the 'modern woman', a photographic and graphic modernity but also of a colonial unconscious surfacing in a racist fascination for a pseudo (Far)-East. Claiming that the magazines are watched as much as read, I analyse the magazine's formal 'desire' for cinema as a guarantee of glamour and as a decisive element of its layout's plasticity. Nudes, landscapes and urban sceneries are linked or dissociated as the reader leafs through it, the poetic flicker of its images relating to the mechanics of editing. Cinema's influence is also to be found in the magazine's special relationship to the night as a site of criminal and sexual transgressions where the prostitute stands as a key figure of the city's margins. Dealing with the return of the repressed expressed in the collective imaginary transpiring through this kind of publication, I research the different types of interrelations established between texts and images as well as the bad taste which is integral to its saucy descriptions of sex scene. An analysis of its plain and clichéd literature sheds light on its relation to vulgarity and its depiction of the reading woman, an iconographic motif through which it equates female reading with masturbation. The magazine's margins and side issues - including small ads, advertisements and photographic contests organised every month to elect the most beautiful readers -, are given a special status within the thesis as as many 'finds' which allow for a more intimate and subjective interpretation of this archive. The plastic attractiveness of these magazines makes it indispensable to show them in an exhibition which is the visual continuation of the written thesis. The 'gesture of exhibiting' these publications is integral to the research process as it will allow me to reimagine an archive and keep it alive.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1982. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Includes bibliographical references. / While the history of photographic color technology has been adequately discussed by E.J. Hall, Joseph Friedman, and Brian Coe, the relationship between complex tri-color systems and generalized use of color photography has not been addressed in the Literature. This investigation is a preliminary study, in survey form, of the wide variety of social, economic, technological, and aesthetic factors affecting the protracted acceptance of color as a means of depiction. In separate analyses covering, 1) 19th century color innovation and interest, 2) Specific impediments related to the delay of color, 3) The selling of color during the 1930's and 40's, 4) The biases against color, 5) The precedents set by black and white rendering , and 6) The problems of resolving an accessible negative/positive color technology, we will describe the sequence of events which contributed to the eventual adoption of color materials and outline the conditions tied to this adoption. A fundamental aspect of this research acknowledges that, while photography was invented in 1839, large scale acceptance and use of color did not occur until 1965 - a full 126 years after the inception of black and white materials. The complex of factors related to this neglect of color has not been the subject of scholarly analysis in the Literature; there is not firm legacy of serious color photography and this couples with the absence of historical inquiry into the aesthetic and social aspects of color's evolution. The important invention of photography has provided us with a predominantly black and white record of things and events since 1839; this thesis, then, is an inquiry into the evolution of a technology and the complex of issues related to the cultural lags attached to most technological innovations. / by Stephen R. Milanowski. / M.S.

Thesis (M.S.V.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1981. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Includes bibliographies. / The photography of architecture is more than a simple tool to record facts about specific buildings. Photography can be used to communicate insights and perceptions about the role of architecture in society and our personal relationship to the architectural environment. This is a study of certain artists, and photographers who have broadened the concept of documentation of architecture. Photographic documents provide factual information as well as personal attitudes and expressive statements. The personal observations of artist/photographers are vital to a wider understanding of the built environment. A wider understanding is a necessary prerequisite to improving that environment. / by Robert H. ALter. / M.S.V.S.

Senegal’s leading role in the development of African modernism in the 1960s is well known. Lesser-known is that, a century earlier, photography first arrived and took root in Senegal before circulating across French West Africa. This dissertation focuses on the genre of photographic portraiture in a country that did not have sculptural or masquerade traditions. It studies the ways in which photography accommodated and fostered new social and artistic practices and identities in Senegal between 1860—when the first studio opened in Saint Louis, the historical capital—and the 1960s, when photography became a “social imperative,” to use Geoffrey Batchen’s description (2001). The first chapter discusses cartes-de-visite commissioned as early as the 1860s by the first Senegalese patrons. In the course of this discussion, I challenge unilateral conceptions of photography as an apparatus of ideological control monopolized by the colonial authority. Chapter Two argues that Islam—the predominant religion in Senegal since the late nineteenth century—facilitated the popularity of the genre of portraiture through the circulation of devotional images in the form of lithographs, glass painting and photographs between the 1890s and 1920s. Chapter Three focuses on two photo series by amateur photographers from Saint Louis in the interwar period. I argue that these snapshots delineate the birth of a new subjectivity that neither mimicked French culture, nor conformed to Wolof customs. The last chapter juxtaposes the work of Mama Casset and Oumar Ka, two studio photographers working in the 1960s and 70s, in the capital and the rural interior of the country, respectively. In doing so I revisit the association between photography’s modernity and urban living, and propose that modernity can also be linked with “rural” tastes and styles. Rather than interpret it as either a “foreign” or “local” technology, this dissertation traces the fluctuations of photography’s significance in a dialectic relation with European, Islamic, American, African and Indian sources, revealing the nature of the medium as a multiplier of visions. Given Senegal's privileged status within La Grande France, this analysis will contribute to our understanding of the relationship between photography and modernity in Africa and beyond.

No description available.

Lam Wai Kit. / Accompanying booklet inserted in pocket at end of book. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-67). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter I. --- Foreword --- p.6 / Chapter II. --- Mirror and Photograph: Beyond its Function as a Carrier --- p.14 / Chapter III. --- The Photographer: Locating the Self in Photographic Portrait --- p.18 / Chapter A. --- Loss and Wholeness --- p.19 / Chapter 1. --- The Fragmentary Body and the Stranger --- p.20 / Chapter 2. --- The Empathy and the Security --- p.23 / Chapter B. --- Demand and Imaginary: Locating the Self in the Mirrored Other --- p.25 / Chapter 1. --- Lacan's 'Mirror Stage' --- p.25 / Chapter 2. --- The Misrecognition of the Self as the Mirrored Other --- p.28 / Chapter 3. --- This is the Self and this is not the Self --- p.29 / Chapter C. --- Desire and Symbolic Order: Photographing the Self with the Mirrored Other --- p.31 / Chapter 1. --- Selection and Fabrication --- p.34 / Chapter 2. --- From Demand to Desire: the Process of Assimilation --- p.38 / Chapter D. --- The Gaze --- p.41 / Chapter 1. --- Eternal Gaze --- p.43 / Chapter 2. --- Desiring to be Seen: The Desire of the Other --- p.44 / Chapter 3. --- """I saw myself seeing myself""" --- p.46 / Chapter E. --- The Endless Desire of Taking Photographic Portrait --- p.51 / Chapter 1. --- The Awareness of Existence --- p.52 / Chapter 2. --- The Limitations under Dominant Symbolic Order: The Impossibility of Authentic Self in Photographic Portrait --- p.54 / Chapter 3. --- The Endless Desire of Searching Authentic Self --- p.56 / Chapter IV. --- The Audience: Locating the Self in Photographic Portrait --- p.58 / Chapter A. --- Empathy --- p.59 / Chapter B. --- Alienation in Exhibits --- p.60 / Chapter V. --- Conclusion --- p.62 / Chapter VI. --- Bibliography --- p.65 / Chapter VII. --- Illustrations --- p.68

The thesis investigates the oeuvre of Andreas Gursky, Jeff Wall and their contemporaries. It aims to provide an art-historical assessment, including the conceptual and philosophical context, complemented by an investigation of the production process of their photographs. One central focus is how the use of digital techniques and advanced printing technologies has affected their photographs. The thesis provides a traditional descriptive investigation and comparison of the artworks discussed; in addition, it relates these photographs to other art genres and thereby offers broader connections to the art world. This modus operandi is enhanced by the inclusion of specific writings on the history and theory of photography, wherein neither the art genres nor the theoretical sources are subject to any temporal or chronological restrictions. The thesis comprises six chapters: I. ‘What Happened to Baudelaire's ‘Secretary'? The Role of Digital Technology in Contemporary Photography' provides the theoretical framework for an understanding of photographic developments in the past, the influence of production processes, digital manipulation, perception and popular understanding of photographs. II. ‘Oscillating between Urmalerei and Urphotographie: Gursky's Journey from Analogue to Digital' examines Gursky's use of analogue and digital photography through a number of case studies. III. ‘Images of our Time: Jeff Wall, ‘a Painter of Modern Life' investigates Wall's artistic development, by focusing on his utilization of Baudelaire's concept of ‘the Painter of Modern Life'. IV. ‘Photographic Nuances and Variations: Contemporary Photographers in Düsseldorf and Vancouver' analyses the academic environment of Gursky and Wall and their fellow students. V. ‘Suspense or Surprise: At the Interface between Photographic Images and Film Stills' looks at the impact of the film genre on photography, and considers similar and comparable aesthetic and stylistic elements. Chapter VI provides a conclusion and a brief outlook in respect of photography.

This thesis explores how early photography contributed to the visual understanding of the world in the nineteenth century. It draws extensively on the collection of nineteenth-century photographic albums at the National Maritime Museum, London. These albums, compiled or purchased by officers in the Royal Navy, offer an extensive view of how the world was perceived by both the officers who collected photographs during overseas service and the photographers who competed to supply them. Chapter 1 considers two personal photographic albums compiled by naval officers Frederick North and Tynte F. Hammill. Through these it reveals the agency of the collector as a curator of their own world picture, and introduces wider currents visible across the archive. Chapter 2 explores the impact of photography on the visual representation of the Crimean War and the competitive market for travel imagery in Britain. Chapters 3 and 4 explore the work of photographer Felice Beato, the studio albums he created in Japan and Korea, and the role of the British navy and military in Asia – a significant early market for overseas photography. Chapter 3 looks at Beato's Views and Costumes albums (c. 1868) and problematizes previous readings, arguing for a more nuanced and cross-cultural approach. This chapter also offers evidence to support a realignment (caused by previous misbinding) of the V&A Views album. Chapter 4 employs Beato's Korean album (1871) as a case study and reveals pictorial slippage across albums previously believed to be homogenous. Chapter 5 explores the secondary use of overseas photographs as engravings in the British press and publications. The thesis concludes that nineteenth-century photographic albums compiled by naval officers while on overseas service offer visual evidence that vision underwent a profound shift during this time and that looking at the world became subjective, fragmentary and contingent.