Thesis (M.A.) in Liberal Studies--University of Maine, 2008. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-56).

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2009. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 21).

Despite present day attitudes and practices in which combinations of photography and other mediums of art are readily accepted, this was rarely the case during the 1960s and 1970s. The pioneering 1970 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Photography into Sculpture, which is the focus of this dissertation, is a compelling exception. Organized by Peter Bunnell, the exhibition highlighted work by twenty-three artists that mixed photographic imagery with three-dimensional forms. The resulting objects often dislocated "straight" photography’s reliance on the image and optical description as its primary source of meaning, characteristics presumed to be fundamental and fixed by many at the time. Bunnell argued that the physicality of the works in Photography into Sculpture made the medium visible and available for critique. This dissertation establishes the archival record and an oral history for the exhibition. It also finds that Bunnell prepared this unorthodox exhibition with John Szarkowski’s endorsement, therefore contradicting enduring views that Szarkowski’s photography program at the Modern promoted a monolithic ideology that did not include experimental modes. Peter Bunnell and Robert Heinecken are the principal figures in Photography into Sculpture. Bunnell, as curator and historian, and Heinecken, as artist and professor of photography at University of California, Los Angeles, were both committed to the idea that the photograph was not only an image but also an object. In public statements they argued that the attention placed on straight photography by many critics and educators discouraged experimentation and excluded an emerging generation of photographers eager to challenge lingering modernist traditions that emphasized the integrity of the image and conventions of display. Both men and their contemporary Nathan Lyons worked from within photography’s established institutions and organizations–including the Museum of Modern Art, George Eastman House, and The Society for Photographic Education–to advocate for alternatives. This dissertation demonstrates that the revolutionary ideas of Bunnell and Heinecken were part of a long rebellion against photographic modernism.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 92-96).

Research submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, March 2017 / The creative component of the research project explores, through the medium of sculpture, the notion of the liminal, with a particular focus on themes of the absurd and the unstable as characteristics of liminality. These themes may be useful for investigating and providing a valuable source for critical assessment, so as to allow for the opening of and extending of debates on reading and thinking about art regarded as ‘in-between’ the poles of a binary opposition. Broadly, it seeks to explore the historical trajectory of the 1960s artist Eva Hesse in relation to these themes, and how it resonates with my own sculpture-making and development. The aim of the written research is, therefore, through engaging with a close critical and theoretically informed reading of selected examples of Hesse’s work, to identify themes and approaches which may inform and advance the understanding of my own work produced in the context of this study. Connections will be drawn to the way in which these themes facilitate a favourable space in which the making of art flourishes. As far as viewers are concerned, such work may encourage the viewer to be an active participant in a dimension of human experience potentially not yet encountered, thereby liberating viewers’ fixed and rigid perceptual constructs. Entering into a discussion of the themes of liminality, the absurd and unstable, serves this aim. / XL2018

(EN) The thesis was created as an analysis of the applied photography of Jan Svoboda (1934-1990). The czech art photographer whose work concludes, next to his own fine-art photographs, amount of documentary pictures of his contemporary art colleagues. Based on an inside view of his fine-art works consisting mostly of still-lifes it became possible to re-analyze large quantity of found material of his so called art reproduction photography which follows the very same principles of his own artwork. The analysis focuses only on documentation of three dimensional pieces of work. Resulting conclusion shows Jan Svoboda as an actual creative competitor of the documented artist's work. By his act of opening a dialog with the documented art piece which leads to a photograph that might have been often considered as an abuse of the particular art piece for the sake of formal qualities of Svoboda's work. The last part of the thesis aims to briefly reveal worldwide context of photographers documenting art pieces with emphasis on the medium of photography and therefore often surpassing demand for faithful depiction of the art object.