Univ., Habil.-Schr. u.d.T.: Stumberger, Rudolf: Klassen-Bilder - Konstitutionsbedingungen sozialdokumentarischer Fotografie 1900 bis 1945--Frankfurt/Main, 2005. / Literaturverz. S. 280 - 288.

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The film Red Line and accompanying thesis revisit the Documentary Torre Bela (1975) by Thomas Harlan and its memory, reflecting upon the role cinema played in revolutionary process in Portugal in 1975 and its enduring significance to the collective memory of this event.

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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.

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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.

This thesis seeks to examine the ways that the success of the Dutch Empire at the turn of the twentieth century was represented and celebrated in the photographic albums of Dutch sugar industrialists in Java. It aims to show how the photographic practices that developed in the colony in parallel with its industrialisation informed the ways that the colony was imagined in the metropolis and the colony. Whether social portraiture, topographic studies or depictions of industrial machinery and infrastructure, the photographs of the sugar industry were part and parcel of a topical vernacular tradition that generated distinct visual themes in the development of popular photographic genres, and which reflected the cultural hybridity and social stratification of the local sugar world. This analysis is pursued through close reading of the photographic albums of the Pietermaat-Soesman family from the Kalibagor sugar factory in Java. These albums exemplify how the family albums of sugar industrialists retained the familiarity and cult value of the family album whilst illustrating the values and attitudes of the colonial industry and society. What is more, the Pietermaat-Soesman albums underline the significance of the albums' materiality; their story is not only one of images, but also a story of objects. I specifically pay attention to the role of photographers and commercial photo studios in the formulation of the pictorial commonplace of the sugar industry. It is the collaboration between sugar industrialists and colony-based photographers that reveals the social necessity, ideological constraints, pictorial conventions and cultural idioms of colonial industry and society in the Dutch East Indies. Largely understudied in both the Dutch and Indonesian histories of photography, this material, I argue, may problematise the ideological premises of ‘colonial' photography.

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This thesis examines the role of photography in making the Canadian Pacific Railway company (CPR) an integral part of Canadian mythology. It focuses on the company's photographic advertising in the 1920s, and the ways in which its increasingly nationalistic transcontinental brochures framed the country, and equated the act of travelling with nation-building and national identity. / The CPR's tourist brochures established a visual vocabulary of the travelling experience, which was readily employed by individuals such as Montreal journalist Frank Randall Clarke. Clarke was sponsored by the CPR to travel across the country in the summer of 1929. His journalistic writing and personal photograph album allow for a rich analysis of the visual culture of the period, and they will be used to illustrate the ways in which the CPR represented Canadian progress, immigration, and tourism.