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This thesis is about emerging changes in photography and imaging related to digitization and how we might approach and understand them, particularly in terms of their impact upon how narratives are constructed. By focusing on the accounts of Queen’s University students this thesis examines the new ways of making, storing, distributing, and viewing images that have emerged with digital photography. Additionally, it looks at the cultural conventions of photography (particularly in relation to the documenting and organization of memory) that remain intact and have important implications for the reception of use of new digital technologies and how these are used to construct narratives. This thesis also looks at the digitization of photography in relation to broader theoretical debates about the dynamics and shifts associated with modernity, postmodernity and ‘global information culture’. Contemporary society is often seen as more capitalist, and in many ways, this is an era of increasing uncertainty, fluidity, and fragmentation. This thesis examines the affinity between the supposed ‘death of narrative’ in social theory and the ‘death of photography’ in terms of how they relate to the ordinary practices of amateur digital photographers. Specific focus is given to Bauman’s (2000) theory of ‘liquid modernity’ and how it offers a compelling account of contemporary society, specifically in terms of changes in narrative and how many individuals are faced with developing ‘biographical solutions’ to systemic problems of increasing uncertainty and fragmentation in the context of globalization and informationalization. In doing so, this thesis aims to address gaps in existing research on digitization that fails to capture the subtleties encountered in the everyday experiences of those engaged in taking the digital turn. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2008-12-09 11:01:58.955

Photography has been exposed as an infinitely complex series of intersecting technologies, industries, discourses and socio-cultural desires. Figured as an image-making medium that bears the direct trace (light) of reality, it has become a fundamental method through which we construct identity, capture memories, communicate knowledge and reflect and shape reality. Its resulting conceptualization as a discourse-laden visual language, that enables the (co)articulation of subject (self), object (device) and truth, has located it as a central locus of ethical consequence. While there has been a significant amount of research into an ethics of photographic representation, there has been very little consideration of the importance of reconsidering the intersection of photography (in and of itself) and ethics in light of digitization. While this thesis will function to map out a number of theoretical and practical trajectories, its central purpose will be to draw upon a rich understanding of analogue and digital photography in order to critically re-imagine ethics in light of digitization. This thesis begins by mapping out a series of continuities and discontinuities in the technological, sociological and practical engagements of photography as a result of digitization. Following in this vein, it will engage in a comparative review of past and present (analogue and digital) photographic practices and theories in an effort to expand the conceptual frames of these trajectories further through an inter-disciplinary and sociological lens. Following this review, and in response to a number of proposed digital novelties, this thesis will revisit past conceptualization of photographic ethics, demonstrate and legitimize their short-comings in the digital age, and begin to imagine alternative means of tackling the ‘impossible possibility’ of digital ethics. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2010-09-29 15:12:36.414

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This study was composed of several large detailed drawings of forms from nature. The drawings were total abstractions of organic forms that had been photographed. The basic composition was structures-of ovals, rectangles and circles with various combinations of the three. With in the basic structures the writer subdivided the areas manipulating organic free forms with reliefs of white special areas.

In his philosophical treatise on photography, The Engine of Visualization: Thinking Through Photography, Patrick Maynard makes a detailed and convincing case that photography, like other technologies, has been developed to 'amplify our powers to do things' - in this case to imagine. Photography is, fundamentally, an 'imagining technology' and photographs - 'depictive pictures' - gain their extraordinary vividness from the efficiency of this technology: Given that we have, in the first place, to look at their marked surfaces in order to be incited and guided to some imagining seeing, pictures of things convert that very looking into an object of imagining. We imagine the represented situation, and also imagine of that looking that gives us access to it that it - our own perceptual activity - is seeing what is depicted. (1997: 107) Photographs are to be used in this thesis as part of an investigation, already proceeding in literary analysis, into representations of racialised space and spatial contest within black life, specifically in Harlem in the first half of the twentieth century. John Roberts, another writer on photography, provides a critical starting point for this enterprise in his book on 'realism, photography and the everyday', The Art of Interruption, in which he applies Henri Lefebvre's theory of a 'critical practice of space' to photography. Roberts examines the part that this technology plays in revealing 'the violence inherent in the production of the abstract space of the market' through its representations of places and spaces. Roberts' belief is that to 'open up the social landscape of the city to representation ... is to see the permanent or transitory result of the complex and ongoing struggle over the legal and symbolic ownership of place' (1998: 194). 'Space,' writes Michel Foucault, 'is fundamental in any form of communal life; space is fundamental in any exercise of power' (1994: 361). The practice of everyday life and the expression of dominance and resistance are expressed spatially at all levels, from the cityscape to the space created by the body. Such 'lived' spaces can be read. They can, as African American polemicist bell hooks remarks, 'tell stories and unfold histories' (1990: 152). Hailed once as the capital of the Negro world and just as swiftly transformed into the 'dark ghetto', Harlem is the paradigm of the black city within a city, placed inside the grid of the American metropolis but set at a distance by de facto, if not de jure segregation. Harlem's invisibility to the wider, whiter world is both symbolic and actual. When, in November 2000, I attended a celebratory reading of the work of the Harlem Renaissance writers, held at the Apollo Theater, perhaps the world's most famous black venue, the Parks Commissioner was due to open proceedings. Arriving late, he made his speech, in which he admitted that this was, after many years in post, his first visit to the Apollo. Venturing north of his main patch - Central Park - was clearly still an adventure, as it had been for the white bohemians and slummers of the 19205, heading off for jazz parties and wild times. In introducing an exhibition of Austin Hansen's photographs of Harlem in 1989 at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the photo historian Rodger C. Birt acknowledged this invisibility: Harlem is as much a symbol as it is a real place. Harlem is uptown and its opposite, downtown, begins at 110th Street, where the park ends. Uptown is black. Downtown is white. Uptown is hip. Downtown is white. Uptown is poor. Downtown is white. Uptown is emotion. Downtown is white. These, and a myriad of other "definitions," ... have served to mark off Harlem from the rest of New York and, in effect, have created out of the reality a kind of terra incognita. (in Hansen, 1989: unpaginated) The binary of black and white, split here by the colour line of 110th Street, runs through much of the writing and thinking about Harlem. What makes Birt's statement particularly interesting is not its reiteration of cultural stereotypes, powerful though they might be, but its unexpressed assumption that the 'white' section of New York is entirely knowable, a territory that - unlike Harlem - can easily be mapped. Birt's suggestion is that photography can provide a map – a cultural guide to Harlem as it is, and was. While I do not accept that photographs are transparencies, or windows on the world, I will be pursuing and exploring the thought in this thesis that, in depicting 'black space' - that is, public and private space as it is and has been lived (and thus inscribed) by African Americans - photographers, both white and black, make Harlem visible. I suggest that photographs themselves can, indeed have to be used as tools for imagining and telling stories. These stories are enacted in space, both the actual space that is recorded chemically or digitally on photographic paper and the virtual space that the photograph, as a (re)presentation of that space, frames and yet opens up to the mind and the senses of the reader. In the play between perception and imagination, between the fixed, indexical imprint and the world that the photograph hints at in its fragmentary condition, we can find a way into Harlem's complexities and ambiguities. Before exploring these ideas through a critical analysis of selected photographs, the Introduction will provide an outline of the historical and theoretic context. Following an account of the development of photographic culture in Harlem from 1915 to 1955, I examine how the black photographic archive is currently shaped and presented, partly in relationship to the production of photographs by white photographers in Harlem during the same period. Finally, I explain my approach to reading photographs and the space they (re)present, and the way in which I have selected and organised the photographs to make my case. The main body of this study then follows. This is divided into six chapters, each using photographic comparisons and analysis to map the struggle for legal and symbolic ownership of space. Chapter One looks at Harlem as a distinctive landscape, the paradigmatic black city produced by white power and black resistance. Having established how the colour line fractures urban space at this level, I then trace its course through other spaces and places. Chapter Two looks at political events taking place on the streets of Harlem, from marches to riots, noting that, by deliberately occupying and writing on the urban fabric, these events create a kind of place in time. Chapter Three looks closely at street activity in more general terms, uncovering how city space is negotiated, claimed and defended as African Americans become urban and learn to 'know their place'. Chapter Four enters the Harlem apartment, a private space compromised by social and economic forces but where African Americans have created a 'home place'. Chapter Five examines what Adrienne Rich calls 'the geography closest in': the body as it appears in the space of the photographic studio and in the context of other places in the city. Chapter Six draws these themes together by looking at The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a photo text about Harlem, as a story of spaces and spatial practices. Finally, my broad arguments and findings are briefly summed up in Conclusions.