This thesis examines the photographs of terminal grain elevators produced by John Vanderpant, a successful Vancouver commercial photographer who also produced images that were consciously positioned within a high art discourse. Vanderpant turned to the grain elevator as subject matter in response to the remarks of an unidentified English critic who, while praising the images in a 1925 London exhibition of Vanderpant's work, noted they lacked an identifiably Canadian character. In taking up the grain elevator, Vanderpant positioned his work within the national visual culture constructed around the work of the Group of Seven. He also tapped into symbolic meanings which resonated around the elevator's modern functional architecture, an architecture which has been held up by Le Corbusier as a specifically North American expression of the engineer's rigor and purpose. In the midst of the prosperity enjoyed by Vancouver's urban bourgeoisie during the mid-1920s, the terminal elevators operating on Burrard Inlet embodied the promise of abundance held out by an increasingly centralized and modernized resource economy. Vanderpant's earliest elevator photographs employed the stylistics of Pictorialism, a genre of photography that relied on soft focus and hazy atmospheric effect to suggest a painterly surface. In response to the tension between his formal vocabulary and the modernity of his subject matter, Vanderpant rejected Pictorialism as a mode of representation that "travelled by horsecart midst the progress of motor power on wheel and wing." Throughout the 1930s he worked within a modernist idiom that emphasized what were seen to be the intrinsic properties of photographic technology: sharp focus, clearly delineated form, and tilted perspective. His modernist elevator photographs verged on geometric abstraction, in an attempt to penetrate "superficial appearance" and reveal the underlying "strength and sublime simplicity" of the elevator's structure. Combining an interest in mysticism and a Kantian understanding of aesthetic experience, Vanderpant accessed a version of modernism that held onto an optimistic, Utopian vision in the face of the social fragmentation of the Depression. My thesis addresses the position of Vanderpant's elevator photographs, and the shift in his aesthetic vocabulary marked out by these works, in relation to the construction of a national movement in Canadian visual art and an historical context in which the state and capital were employing specific measures to unify and transform a fractured social body. I argue that, within this context, Vanderpant's project was fragile and contradictory. Despite the antimaterialism he articulated as the Depression advanced, the ideological force of Vanderpant's Utopian vision would seem to have been aligned with the forms of modern scientific discipline, such as Taylorism, that promised Utopia through success in production while naturalizing dominative social relations. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

Apparu vers le milieu du XIXe siècle comme jargon dans les cercles artistiques munichois désignant une image de piètre qualité, bon marché, le mot kitsch s’utilise aujourd’hui non seulement dans le monde de l’art mais aussi dans la vie quotidienne toujours avec un sens fortement péjoratif. Considéré en général comme « mauvais goût », « art sans valeur », « camelote artistique », ou « art vulgaire », le kitsch n’est pourtant pas un concept qui demeure seulement dans une dimension esthétique ou artistique. Les divers phénomènes historiques du kitsch, émergés dans le contexte de la modernité, comme « la bib[e]lotomanie », « le roman-feuilleton », « l’art pompier » en France au XIXe siècle, ou encore « la peinture de salon de coiffure » en Corée au XXe siècle, trahissent tous que le kitsch est en effet une attitude que l’homme adopte vis-à-vis de son existence et du monde dans la réalité. L’essentiel de ce concept réside donc dans sa négation ou mieux dans sa fuite de la réalité. Voilà pourquoi la photographie se présente comme un médium qui mérite d’être étudié en rapport avec le kitsch. Médium qui a un lien spécifique par excellence avec le réel, elle ne cesse de faire ontologiquement le va-et-vient entre le présent et le passé, l’instantanéité et l’éternel, l’ici et l’ailleurs, le sujet et l’objet, la vie et la mort, etc. C’est en effet à cause de cette ontologie paradoxale que la photo peut devenir, selon « l’acte photographique », non seulement de l’art mais aussi du kitsch. Ainsi, l’attitude envers ce dernier que les artistes laissent apercevoir à travers leur œuvre photographique s’avère extrêmement variée, et ambiguë, voire même contradictoire tout comme chez Pierre et Gilles, Vik Muniz, Sebastião Salgado et Oliviero Toscani. / Appeared in the mid-nineteenth century as a jargon in the artistic circles of Munich designating a cheap image of poor quality, the term “kitsch” is used today not only in the art world, but also in everyday life, always with strongly pejorative sense. Generally considered as “bad taste”, “worthless art”, “artistic junk” or “vulgar art”, kitsch, however, is not a concept that remains only in aesthetic or artistic field ?. Various historical phenomena of kitsch which had been all emerged in the context of modernity, such as “bib[e]lotomanie”, “serialized novel”, “academic art” in France in the nineteenth century, or “barbershop’s painting” in Korea in the twentieth century, show that kitsch is indeed an attitude of human being toward his own existence and the world. The essence of this concept lies therefore in his negation of reality, or better in his escape from reality. That’s why photography deserves to be studied in relation with the kitsch. Having a specific link with the reality, the medium oscillate ontologically between the present and the past, the instant and the eternity, the here and the elsewhere, the subject and the object, the life and the death, etc. It is indeed because of this paradoxical ontology that the photography can become, according to the “acte photographique” not just art but also kitsch. Thus, the attitude to the latter the artists let reveal through their photographic work turn out extremely varied and ambiguous, even contradictory such as it does in the work of Pierre et Gilles, Vik Muniz, Sebastião Salgado and Oliviero Toscani.

The diploma thesis deals with the concepts of author and authorship in the photography of the Czech lands in the first half of the 20th century, taking into account the international influence, essential from the perspective of the development of photography in this region. This given era became a fruitful and manifold stage of development of the "fine art" photography and of the interest in the photographer himself. The thesis starts by giving a brief evaluation of the changing role of a photographer as an author since the very invention of photography. It then focuses on pictorialism and via the beginnings of modern photography moves on to discuss the avant-garde. In each particular development period the thesis finds outstanding authors as well as specific issues related to the subject matter of authorship, and by means of that also points out the power of an individual who is able to influence an entire generational movement. By unfolding individual development of particular authors (Drahomír Josef Růžička, František Drtikol, Josef Sudek, Jaromír Funke, Eugen Wiškovský, Jindřich Štýrský) the thesis aims to prove that every single style period in the history of photography bears specific significance for the next period; although this influence is often denied by the authors themselves in...

Cette étude est une analyse de l’évolution de la notion de photographie pure, dans les discours en Grande-Bretagne, entre 1860 et 1917. Définie comme une image non retouchée ni manipulée, la photographie pure est envisagée en miroir de la retouche et des interventions sur les négatifs et positifs. Une exploration des journaux britanniques a mis en lumière cette préoccupation constante pour la définition et la légitimité des moyens de la photographie. Premièrement, la question des combination printings, de la notion de vérité comme essence de la photographie ainsi que l’aspect des images photographiques sont source de débats. Les discours d’acceptation et de rejet des pratiques de ciels rapportés, de coloriage et de la retouche apportent un éclairage sur la genèse de la retouche. Ces points, corrélés à la présence de la photographie pure dans les expositions, soulignent l’émergence d’une volonté puriste dès les années 1860. Enfin, les discours sur la photographie pure de Peter Henry Emerson et de Frederick H. Evans sont mis en parallèle et contextualisés au sein du pictorialisme, pour mieux en dessiner la définition. Ainsi se relient, dans ces débats sur la pureté, les limites de l’expérimentation et les aspects de la photographie, les figures d'Alfred H. Wall, Oscar Gustav Rejlander, Julia Margaret Cameron, Robert Demachy, Alvin Langdon Coburn et Alfred Stieglitz. Leurs discours et leurs recherches éclairent un idéal à atteindre, difficilement applicable, un mythe plus qu’une réalité. / This study is an analysis of the evolution of the notion of pure photography, in discourses happening in Great Britain between 1860 and 1917. Defined as a photograph that is neither retouched nor manipulated, pure photography is envisaged in regard to retouching and negative and positive interventions. An exploration of British periodicals has brought to light the constant preoccupation for the definition and legitimacy of the photographic tools. First, the question of combination printings, the notion of truth as the essence of photography and the aspect of photographic images are a source of debate. The discourses of acceptance and rejection of practices such as printing-in clouds, colouring and retouching shine light on the genesis of retouching. These aspects, paralleled with the presence of pure photography in exhibitions, highlight the emergence of a purist aspiration as early as 1860. Finally, the discourses of Peter Henry Emerson and Frederick H. Evans on pure photography are confronted and contextualized within pictorialism, to further its definition. Thus, through these debates on purity, the limits of experimentation and the aspects of photography, the figures of Alfred H. Wall, Oscar Gustav Rejlander, Julia Margaret Cameron, Robert Demachy, Alvin Langdon Coburn and Alfred Stieglitz are connecting. Their discourses and research put forth an ideal, out of reach, impractical, a myth more than a reality.