Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-26T15:19:01Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 tese_6407_DISSERTACAO FINAL_CLERISTON BOECHAT.pdf: 275592712 bytes, checksum: bf7398cd8738a8c8dff1819f50ff0a4f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-04-02 / Investiga o estilo documentário do fotógrafo americano Walker Evans na exposição e no livro American Photographs, de 1938. Analisa as fotografias do autor a partir de textos críticos de diversos autores, dentre eles Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Rosalind Krauss, John Szarkowski e Alan Trachtenberg. Identifica e aborda as principais influências literárias e fotográficas na construção do estilo documentário: o não-aparecimento do autor defendido por Gustave Flaubert; o espírito de modernidade de Charles Baudelaire; o repertório e a abordagem direta de Eugène Atget; a construção de uma tradição fotográfica americana em Mathew Brady e em Paul Strand. Ao tratar da exposição, aborda os principais temas desenvolvidos ali pelo artista e ainda como trabalhou a sequência fotográfica contra a ideia modernista da fotografia como imagem singular e contra a pompa da expografia museográfica. Aborda a relação entre o artista e o Museu de Arte Moderna de Nova York, o MoMA, instituição que patrocinou a publicação e abrigou a mostra. Ao tratar do livro American Photographs, aborda separadamente parte um e dois da publicação, ressaltando os diferentes temas e sequências desenvolvidos pelo artista. Palavras-chave: Fotografia. Walker Evans. Estilo documentário. American Photographs. MoMA.

« Lyrisme : jeu qui lie et délie les noms et les corps – tous les noms et tous les corps. Son terrain est celui de la vie et de la mort entrelacées, un festin offrant formes, déformations, transformations. Sa matière est l’air, souvent irrespirable, son milieu est l’image, parfois invisible, sa réalité est la voix, presque inaudible. » L’exposition Tamis Lyrique, préparée et prolongée par l’ouvrage éponyme, présente un ensemble d’œuvres déployant une pratique lyrique et spéculative de la photographie, au croisement de diverses formes et disciplines : composition et montage, caractérisation topographique et récit filmique, écriture et installation. Certaines œuvres sont extraites des travaux récents accomplis au cours de l’élaboration de la thèse (photographies de Cherbourg, et le livre La ville que nous voyons ; L’air de l’accordéon, film co-réalisé avec Fanny Béguery en Corrèze). Dix pièces diverses parleurs sujets et leurs formes (vues photographiques, assemblages, objets, séquence de film) sont inédites. Quelques œuvres, plus anciennes, complètent cet ensemble, faisant l’objet de développements écrits particuliers dans le livre Tamis lyrique et permettant de repérer des variations ou d’apprécier une épaisseur temporelle des processus qui structurent le travail. / “ Lyricism is binding and unbinding names and bodies,playing in between all of the names and the bodies. Itsground is made of life and death together interweaved :a feast offering forms, deformations, transformations. Its material is the air, often unbreathable, its milieu is the image, invisible sometimes, its reality is the voice,almost inaudible.” The exhibition Tamis lyrique and the eponymous book present a group of works of art stemming from a lyric and speculative experience of photography, interbreeding diverse forms: tableau and montage, topographical characterization and filmic sequencing, writing and installation. Some of the works were produced during the doctoral thesis elaboration period, such as the photographs taken in Cherbourg, along with the book La ville que nous voyons, or the film L’air de l’accordéon, codirected with Fanny Béguery in Corrèze. Ten other various works are previously unseen. Some more works are older and were the subject of specific writings in the book Tamis lyrique, or enable to perceive variations or to appreciate a temporal density in the construction of the work.

My dissertation contemplates the role that New Deal era photographs played in developing a sense of place particular to New York City’s environs. I argue that photographers used the camera as a tool to cultivate the relationship between people and the urban landscape by focusing their lens on liminal and collective spaces within the metropolitan environment. My first chapter examines Helen Levitt’s survey of African-American, Latinx, and Italian children in East Harlem, sponsored by the Federal Art Project. My second chapter reviews a series produced under the same Project—Arnold Eagle and David Robbins’s study of the Jewish and Italian sections of the Lower East Side. My third chapter turns to Sid Grossman and Sol Libsohn’s chronicling of Irish and Italian second-generation immigrants in Chelsea, supported by the Photo League. In each chapter, I contend that the prominence of communal spaces within these images results in documents that can be read as an effort by photographer and subject alike to define their place within the contested sites of the urban street. Through this focus on vernacular spaces, these surveys disrupt ideals of belonging and work to document processes of place-making distinct to each occupier. Employing analytical lenses of cultural geography and phenomenology, I theorize the role of collective spaces within each series. These vernacular sites, propelled by their indistinct physical and social dimensions, hold slippery identities, shifting boundaries, and a collection of potential “owners.” Due to this ambiguity, these spaces hold an opportunity for collective emergent action. Throughout these series the photographers show neighborhood dwellers engaging collective spaces of the city to satisfy their quotidian needs. My dissertation examines how inhabitants, through acts of play, ritual, and embodied remembrance, transform these interstitial spaces into place. I consider the photographer’s role as folklorist, sociologist, and archeologist—as they survey how their subjects engage, occupy, and transform the local and ordinary spaces of their metropolitan landscape into places created and claimed by city-dwellers. In attending to the spatial dimension, I consider how photographs register and explore the lives of marginalized communities within the contested landscapes of New York City’s streets.

This thesis examines similarities in photographs made by the contemporary photographer Keith Carter and photographers active with the Farm Security Administration during the 1930s. Stylistically and in function, works by Carter and these photographers comment on social and cultural values of a region. This thesis demonstrates that many of Carter's black and white photographs continue, contribute to, and expand traditions in American documentary photography established in the 1930s. These traditions include the representation of a specific geographic place that evokes the spirit of a time and place, and the ability to communicate to a viewer certain social conditions and values related to such a place.

In this dissertation, I provide three studies of artistic practice in the era of the Great Depression. In each chapter, I write about a different set of artists working in the southeastern United States: I write about Walker Evans and the artistic and literary community located in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana (1926-1941); Edwin and Elise Harleston and their portrait studio in Charleston, South Carolina (1922-1931); and Bill Traylor and the artists who founded the New South Gallery and Art School in Montgomery, Alabama (1939-1940). Drawing from public and private archival collections, I consider how these artists made works that represented the South while they also made connections with artists and visual communities elsewhere; these connections placed them in dialogue with artists of the Harlem Renaissance, of American Regionalism, and of the Mexican Mural Movement. Although the artists in each chapter were from different Southern cities, they shared similar interests in the importance of developing and participating in artistic community. I situate each study in this dissertation in relation to a type of artistic practice. These types of artistic practice—documentary, portraiture, and exhibition—served as loci for Southern artists’ ideas about time and place. Southern studies have been haunted by the idea that the South always looks backward, to the past. In these three studies, I consider how Southern artists and their contemporaries in other places took different approaches to referencing the past and imagining a future for the South. The works made by these Southern artists—which are linked by their complicated relationships to race, history, and place—are largely absent from histories of American and 20th century art. Their absence tells us much about the stakes behind history writing. By bringing these studies into dialogue with other, existing, art historical contexts and communities, I trace how historical absence is constructed and why such absences are important to consider. The works in this dissertation are also linked by their difference from a kind of Modernism; in their multiple and discrepant modernisms, the artists in this dissertation made work which was both modern and not-modern, which looked backward while pushing forward. / text