Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 151-161). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 151-161). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2005. / Vita. Thesis advisor: K. Dian Kriz. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 231-250). Also available online.

Thesis (M.S. in Library Science)--University of North Carolina.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2009. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 57-61).

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2009. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 38-39).

This thesis is an examination of the ways in which city-life photography can provide insights into the structuring conditions of urban spectatorship during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To this end, the thesis will involve a survey of some of the uses of photography in the representation various cities during this period. However, the aim of this survey is not simply to collate a range of 'images of the city'. Instead, the central theme of this work is a discussion of the ways in which photography structures our perception. Fundamental to this discussion is a reformulation of what constitutes a photographic archive. It is as a means to redefining this archive that the notion of the gaze which will be employed to refer both to structures of subjectivity and vision and to particular regimes of representation. As a consequence of this reading, the archive will not be defined in terms of individual photographers, styles or genres. Instead, it will be read as a structure of repetition and displacement, of identity and difference: in short, as a system of signification which both offers and denies positions of security, knowledge and pleasure to the viewer. As a means of pursuing this reappraisal of the archive the thesis will be organised around a series of readings of texts from post-structuralist and psychoanalytical theory as well as from critical commentaries on urbanism, modernity and social space. Following from these readings will be an analysis of photographs with reference to the intersection of the psychical and the social which will not be cited as two distinct registers of experience but will instead be seen as being mutually inflected. It is within this theoretical framework that photographs will be viewed as images which both summon and disrupt the presence (as stable identity) of the viewer and the presence (as unmediated literal transcription) of the objects and scenes which they represent.

My research seeks to understand the complexity of East Greenwich residents' affective reactions at the moment when this landscape was undergoing a dramatic and rapid change. I walked its riverside to the Dome while this was turned from a mostly dismissed and derelict industrial land to a residential area ready to host parts of the Olympic Games. My starting point is that a process of gentrification with symbolic and material displacement of working-class people and their social practices has been occurring. Throughout my fieldwork, I constantly seek to understand the emotional reactions to this pervasive urban change from local residents, workers, and occasional passers-by who I met during the last five years. I have done this with the aid of my always obsolete digital camera and my walking boots, and applying photo elicitation technique whenever it was possible. The unique combination of photographs, walks, and interviews helped me to unpack, from the lower ground perspective of local working-class residents, their affective reactions to this peculiar change. Such an emplaced and class-based struggle opens to what I call the 'geography of resentment'. My hypothesis is that this resentment is a form of reaction against the symbolic violence that gentrification brings. The vehicle through which resentment is expressed is a form of remembering very close to nostalgia, which I decouple from both 'imperial melancholia' and 'hierarchical belonging'. Rather, I contend that this is a form of affective class struggle fought at the level of the symbolic. A debate remains open about the extent to which such controversial form of affection maintains distance from political instrumentalisation and mainstream discourses of communitarian cohesion, while at the same time reflecting the paradoxes of urban change.

This research looks at comedy and question what its function is. It identifies the gag as a specific moment that solicits laughter and examines what is expressed within and through a gag and whether a gag can trigger a change in our thinking. What are the structures, functions and outcomes of a gag? The project approaches these questions through an examination of the relationship between the visual and the verbal within the gag. This examination involves two very different types of comedy, silent and stand-up, and considers specific gags from both. The methods used for this examination take the form of both a body of visual artwork and a written thesis. The visual work consists of photographs, videos and text pieces. It is within the video works that the relationship between the visual and the verbal is most readily seen and this is due to the mimetic techniques used to make the work. The videos are a series of re-enactments of silent and stand-up moments and involve my re-performance to camera of selected gags. I have removed certain elements from the gag while emphasizing others through mimicry. In doing so I hope to make the viewer of the relationship between language and gesture within a gag. The writing begins with an examination of what it is that constitutes a gag. The relationship between gag and narrative is looked at first, then the relationship between the comic performer and the audience, and finally the ways in which the comic performer manipulates the medium that is used to create the gag. Following this comes a close reading of three comic performers’ work: Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., Richard Pryor’s Live in Concert and Jo Brand’s Barely Live. The gags in each work are examined in order to see how the relationship between the visual and the verbal is used to solicit laughter and then further examined in order to discover what effect the gag has on its audience. How do language and gesture work together to challenge the audience's thinking? The methods used in both the practical work and the writing are empirical in natures. The source material is examined closely: gags are unpicked and put back together again. This approach allows the research to tease out some propositions surrounding the relationship between the visual and the verbal.

Falling into Photography examines the relationship between loss, desire and the imaginary. Across writing, photographic works and film pieces, we move from real to imagined spaces, exploring the boundaries between autobiography and fiction within the alternate orphic worlds evoked. Within staged fantastical images, the subjects are turned-away figures of loss, desired but always already beyond reach. The photographic medium is worked upon with painting, collage and montage, narrative voice over juxtaposed with moving image. Here, the photographic is loosened from its referent, slipping in and out of darkness, cloaked in dripping inks and bathed in subtle hues of tinted light. The spaces inhabited within the films and images are womb-like liquid spaces of night, moving from beds to swamps and caves, from the mother to the lover in search of a primordial return. Central to the work lies an exploration of the origins of fantasy and desire and how these are bound to experiences of loss and representation. The following essays explore these themes, interweaving psychoanalysis, philosophy and fiction with the artist's own prose and visual works. This story of falling, into the image and into love, asks what it is to make a work of art and how this process is necessarily bound to the maternal. The relationship between mourning and the creative process is explored throughout the writing, with emphasis on the photographic object, process and encounter.