This dissertation analyzes Life’s early coverage of the Cold War (1945-1954) in order to explicate this publication’s creation and reinforcement of prescriptive attitudes about this ideological engagement through photographically illustrated news. By uncovering Life’s editorial approach this project proposes a new diagnostic for evaluating documentary images by re-configuring Hayden White’s incisive theory of emplotment—the process of engendering historical narratives with meaning— through semiotic models proposed by Louis Hjelmslev and Roland Barthes, thereby offering a useful tool for future scholars to re-examine modern media’s transition towards prizing visual immediacy over critical engagement. Life’s editors’ link narrative devices and rhetoric with photographs to make these images appear as first-hand experience and function as objective conclusions. Life characterizes the Cold War as an epic moral struggle between the US and USSR, and its 1943 special issue on Russia acts as the comedic prologue to this narrative by distinguishing these ideologically disparate wartime allies. After post-war agreements fail, this congenial atmosphere swiftly transitions into another battle between democracy and tyranny, defined through literary conventions. Life employs synecdoche and allegory to encode photographs of individuals as icons of valorous populations (Americans and Eastern Europeans) and to symbolize concepts (democracy and charity). Metonymy and irony transform photographs into direct signs of Communism and visual evidence of its degeneracy. Life’s comic presentation of Marshal Josip Tito contrasts with its satiric coverage of Senator Joseph McCarthy to direct readers’ attention towards the best and worst possible courses of action regarding the Communist menace, at home and abroad.

This dissertation examines the use of photography in civil rights educational efforts from 1957 to 1972. Photography played an important role in the long civil rights movement, resulting in major legal advances and greater public awareness of discriminatory practices against people of color. For most civil rights organizations and many African Americans, education was seen as the single most important factor in breaking down social and political barriers, and efforts toward equal education opportunities dramatically increased following the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. My dissertation therefore investigates photography’s distinct role in documenting the activities of three educational initiatives—the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, the Mississippi Freedom Schools formed the summer of 1964, and the Black Panther liberation schools established in Oakland, California, in 1969—to reveal the deep and savvy understanding of civil rights and Black Power organizations of the relationship between educational opportunities and political power.

In 1971, on the eve of his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Evans declared his photographs to be “documentary style” rather than documents. “A document has use, whereas art is really useless,” Evans would claim. “Therefore art is never a document, though it certainly can adopt that style.” Yet, the photographer produced the majority of his pictures as documents for various individuals and institutions throughout his life. How, then, does one reconcile this tension between the work of art and its contexts, between the photograph and its various uses, between individual autonomy and the institutions of photography in Evans’s career? This dissertation seeks to elucidate this dichotomy within the changing contexts for photography from the early 1930s to the mid-1970s. Three chapters focus on key contexts for the production and dissemination of Evans’s work. The Introduction revisits the literature on Evans and the issues of context versus style in the history of photography. The problem of “documentary style” in the 1930s is addressed in Chapter One, which examines the overlooked context of architectural surveys during that decade. Two explores how Evans engaged with mass culture through independent projects, commissioned photo essays, and his job as photographic editor at Fortune magazine from 1948 to 1965. After thirty years of working for magazines, Evans became a professor of photography at Yale University. Three exhumes his role as a theorist and didact, examining how he crafted new interpretations of his photographs and photography that suited the new institutional contexts of the art world. Through both his pictures, writings, and their presentations, Evans continually worked with and against his contexts.

The areas of investigation are the portrait, the gaze, the American filmmaker Errol Morris, representation of reality and subcultures. These are discussed within an historical, technical, cultural and social framework. Colour, the film theorist Bill Nichols, the filmmaker Errol Morris are discussed with reference to the central gaze and what constitutes reality. Taking on another identity, the role of subcultures and my influences as a photographer are explored within this context. Work for Examination Other Lives is a photographic work consisting of portraits including: civil war re-enactors who believe that the war between the northern and southern states of America still exist Elvis Presley impersonators and fans who believe that Elvis Presley still lives people who take on another identity as scarecrows in the context of a local festival people who take on another identity as medieval knights.

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The areas of investigation are the portrait, the gaze, the American filmmaker Errol Morris, representation of reality and subcultures. These are discussed within an historical, technical, cultural and social framework. Colour, the film theorist Bill Nichols, the filmmaker Errol Morris are discussed with reference to the central gaze and what constitutes reality. Taking on another identity, the role of subcultures and my influences as a photographer are explored within this context. Work for Examination Other Lives is a photographic work consisting of portraits including: civil war re-enactors who believe that the war between the northern and southern states of America still exist Elvis Presley impersonators and fans who believe that Elvis Presley still lives people who take on another identity as scarecrows in the context of a local festival people who take on another identity as medieval knights.

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1981. / Typescript. Section of magazine included as accompanying material. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 36-37).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Delaware, 1982. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 371-379).

Thesis--Syracuse University. / Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 612-628).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 121-124). Also available on the Internet.