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.

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This practice-based research examines, analyses and responds to the use of nostalgia as an ideological mechanism in the development of Japanese national identity and as an integral aspect of modernity. In discussions of the construction of national identities, whether in terms of 'narrative' or material culture, 'image' and 'vision' have generally been used as metaphorical terms. This thesis investigates the use of nostalgia in photography as a de facto visual construction of national space. Three groups of archive photographic material are examined; landscapes of the late 19th century genre of Yokohama shashin, or tourist photo, pictorial photography of the Taishö-period (1912 - 1926), and propaganda photography produced in Japanese-occupied Manchuria from the 30s and 40s. Nostalgia is then investigated in contemporary sites of leisure and consumerism, where it is considered as elemental in attempts to redefine the identity of Japan as a post-industrial society. In exploring the use of nostalgia in different historical periods and styles of photography, the primary objective of this research is not to provide a critique of the formal attributes of these images. It is rather to examine, both theoretically and visually, nostalgia's reoccurrence as a mechanism of historical erasure, in which each manifestation posits its own version of authenticity.

This thesis is concerned with an investigation into the possibilities of implementing various aspects of a purely digital stereo-photogrammetric (DSP) system on the IBM 3090 150E mainframe multi-user computer. The main aspects discussed within the context of this thesis are:-i) Mathematical modelling of the process of formation of digital images in the space and frequency domains.ii) Experiments on improving the pictorial quality of digital aerial photos using Inverse and Wiener filters.iii) Devising and implementing an approach for the automatic sub-pixel measurement of cross-type fiducial marks for the inner orientation, using the Gradient operator and image modelling least squares (IML) approach.iv) Devising and implementing a method for the digital rectification of overlapping aerial photos and the formation of the stereo-model.v) Design and implementation of a digital stereo-photogrammetric system (DSP) and the generation of a DTM using visual measurement.vi) Investigating the feasibility of stereo-viewing of binary images and the possibility of performing measurements on such images.vii) Implementing a method for the automatic generation of a DTM using a one-dimensional image correlation along epipolar lines and experimentally optimizing the size of the correlation window.viii) Assessment of the accuracy of the DTM data generated both by the DSP and the automatic correlation method.ix) Vectorization of the rectification and correlation programs to achieve higher speed-up factors in the computational process.

Passing Through, an installation of photography, encourages the nature of memory through an engagement with the materiality of photographic images. Considering memory as an ephemeral phenomenon, I am interested in exploring the emotional and psychological affects that images have on the body and mind. Strategies of collecting and tracing are employed as a means of forming connections between people, places, materials, objects, and images. Recounting personal history, storytelling and participating in the immediate present, I actively seek out images as a means for re-experiencing memory. Triggers reveal themselves during the collection and deconstruction of both personal and found photographic material. Re-assembling this information produces an archive consisting of real and re-imagined fragments of spaces and narratives. Together, these processes produce a body of work that considers the image as an experiential entity that is inherently memory based; triggering memory to create an emotive response in the viewer.

The written component of this thesis is presented in accompaniment with an experimental hyperimage documentary artefact entitled Bridging Adelaide 2001. It is a hermeneutic text reflecting on practice that incorporates digital image capture, electronic image editing, human-computer interface design and hypermedia content development. Bridging Adelaide 2001 incorporates a photographic documentary that was produced by a collaborator and myself and first exhibited in 1981. That earlier work has been supplemented with digital imagery that I have produced as part of this research. In part, the thesis is a commentary comparing my practice as a photographer who has in the past used analogical techniques to produce documentary work for exhibition in public spaces and galleries and, my practice as a contemporary, digital image-maker and designer producing work using HTML for dissemination, in this case, via CD-ROM. I describe my experimental approach and call it ontological design after Winograd and Flores. I propose that Pickering's metaphor of the “dance of agency” arising from observation of scientific experimental practice, that theorises material agency, is also apt. My thesis explores the ontological implications of computer mediation and manipulation. An historical analysis of the development of software tools for graphics and artefacts of mediation in the form of trademarks is presented. A co-determined process, of tools making manifest desire in their capabilities and, of tools conditioning creative output is observed. The role of virtuality in relation to understanding the nature of tools is discussed. Three ontological models - one from Levy, one from Haraway and, one from Hayles - are overlaid with the intention of conveying a contemporary understanding of nature of virtuality, and of mediation and manipulation as a condition is described. The contemporary, networked computer mediation paradigm is contrasted with the mass media paradigm. The latter is associated with a dilution of photography's documentary authority, the former with re-establishing that authority. This differs from the common assumption that the transience of the digital image undermines its representational reliability. Phenomenological argument of Merleau-Ponty is presented in support of my claim that computer-mediation is corporeal. The actor-network theory of Latour and Callon provides means to argue for the social, political and cultural relevance of Bridging Adelaide 2001. / Thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 2004.

Thesis (MEng(ElectricalEngineering))--University of South Australia, 2004.

Ever since the camera was invented people have been using it as a tool to reflect and record the world around them. Photographic images have great potential to investigate different social practices and phenomena in the world. Photography, in its own right, is an extremely large area of study. Despite its relatively short history, photography has undergone a broad and complex evolution since it was invented in 1840. This paper does not aim to cover the comprehensive history of the development of photography in its many facets, it aims however to concentrate on a specific area of what has come to be termed visual sociology and the potential of the still photographic image as a primary tool within the field. Visual sociology is a marginal, experimental area of sociology, it is a field which has not been given due consideration by many sociologists due to its unscientific nature and one which remains unfamiliar to many social documentary photographers. This paper traces the history of visual sociology and explores its roots and links with social documentary photography. It explores the established methods of visual data collection that are utilised within the field of visual sociology. It also explores a further sub-discipline, urban sociology and the role of the image in investigation of urban phenomena. The resulting practical component of this research is an extensive urban photographic investigation shot over the period of one month in the city of Tokyo. The resulting series of images exist as a type of photographic visual map of ‘city creatures’ ubiquitous in the urban environment. The series aims to constitute as a visual, cultural survey about an aspect of social life within the Japanese urban context.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1983. / Includes bibliographical references.