Amplifications in photographic production and the increased access to images in the 21st century uniquely position photography to articulate and intervene in social structures of power and provide new opportunities for civic engagement. In particular, photography has the potential to articulate and resist what can be understood as a politics of disposability, or the ways in which particular populations are rendered superfluous to the economic and social logic of neoliberalism and channeled out of society. I assert that neoliberal violence must be understood, in part, as a visual problem: the particularities of representation and visibility must be examined in light of the need to consider neoliberal social and economic policies as something other than an inevitability. This dissertation explores the ways that photography can serve to make visible not only the people and discourses that have been marginalized and suppressed, but the structures of disposability itself. Developments in artistic practices and departures from traditional documentary genres converge with precarious labor conditions for cultural workers to widen the parameters for photographic production. The resulting work engages both with the ontological questions of what documentary photography has become as well as with its ability to operate as a potential site of activism—rather than mere representation—through new modes of mediation. This dissertation examines new photographic work that addresses the multiple facets of a neoliberal politics of disposability, the effects of which are compounded by race, class, and gender: police violence and domestic militarization, the skyrocketing rate of women’s incarceration, and the institutional threats to youth and activism in the public sphere. These emergent photographic practices employ new strategies of visualization in order to complicate the viewer’s relationship to representations of violence, contributing to a discourse that broadens the possibility for a critical and productive use of photographs, and imagining alternatives to the material and ideological conditions of neoliberal disposability. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation examines the ability of emergent modes of documentary photography to articulate and resist social and political violence that is characteristic of neoliberalism, for example the domestic militarization and increased incarceration rates, the shrinking of access to the public sphere, and the particular ways in which certain populations become especially vulnerable to such violence. Shifts in photographic production thanks to new media platforms and the reconfigurations of traditional photography genres have produced photographic strategies that are crucially poised to address such issues. The photographers and projects explored in this dissertation employ new ways of visualizing violence, speaking back to the ways that photography can be used to stultify discourse and misrepresent populations, and harnessing innovative modes of proliferating their work to produce new photographic and political communities.

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Photography today is based more in editing and manipulation than in the physical capturing of the photo. The pervasiveness of photo editing is only going to increase; however, whether an edited photo remains true to the original photo, let alone the original scene, is left for the photographer to determine. Photographers attempt to create the "perfect" image and are willing to sacrifice the original photo in the process. The finished product becomes in many cases an entirely different photo from the original, to the extent that it is more a product of the editing software than the actual camera. My project takes the form of a photo-editing manual, viewable in both physical and digital format, and an exhibition of the final images. None of the images are so extreme that it is immediately clear that they have been manipulated; however, as they are all images of Scripps College, people who are familiar with the campus will be able to recognize that something is off. I see these images as products of editing software more than products of a camera. I have exaggerated commonly used editing techniques to draw attention to their excessive use in photography today. In the manual, the manipulation and changes suggested become gradually more extreme, so that if the reader does not a first question the instructions, he or she will be sure to by the end.

What happens to the memories that are left behind in photographs when the person who’s memories they are passes away? After the passing of both my mother and my grandmother, I began to notice the fleeting significance of photographs. I spent time going through boxes of pictures they had saved and every so often I would come across an old photo of someone or something that no one in my family could find a meaning behind or attach a significance to. This paper reveals how the meaning and importance of photographs shift over time from the perspective of the photographer to that of the preserver. I discuss the history of photography and its evolution from a purely scientific method of recording to fine art. I also discuss the psychology behind taking a photograph, looking at the art historical and philosophical writings of Susan Sontag and John Berger to discover how photography relates to memory, nostalgia, mortality, and the presence of the absent. Putting my own work in a historical context, I examine the works of contemporary artists dealing with similar themes of photography, physical space, and memory, such as Carmen Argote, Manal Al Dowayan, Christian Boltanski, and Doris Salcedo. For my senior project, I contemplate the mystery behind my mom's decision to photograph unsuspected places. I explore the passage of time and the vulnerability of memories as they relate to photography. Through an installation of hanging panels of photographs printed on sheer fabric, my piece works to explore these two main themes: the preservation of memory and the space that grief fills.

QC 351 A7 no. 20 / The control system described in this thesis was designed to automatically guide the position of photographic plates during long exposures of astronomical objects. The system senses the position of the guide star which is being used as a position reference, and moves the photographic plate in two orthogonal directions in order to maintain a constant position of the image of the astronomical object on the photographic plate. The system was designed to have a bandwidth of 35 radians per second in order to track the worst case image excursions due to atmospheric turbulence and telescope motion. The closed loop transient response of the system was determined from considerations of final image resolution of the photographic plate. Due to the necessity of guiding on stars of unknown brightness the system incorporated an automatic gain control loop within the forward control loop and was made unconditionally stable by high order feedback. In operation on the Steward Observatory telescopes, the system has made a significant increase in photographic plate resolution over manually guided plates.

The iPhone is the most popular smartphone and camera on social media. iPhoneography, the photography taken or edited with the iPhone, has set the trend of nostalgic photography on social media during the 2010s; thus, the iPhone, a high-tech camera, produces low-tech-looking images. This dissertation attempts to find out why iPhone photographers (iPhoneographers) take, edit, and share images that mimic photographs taken with analog photographic equipment. I argue that nostalgia allows iPhoneographers to use the iPhone as a creative tool and to belong to a community. Based on the arguments of Vilém Flusser—who suggested that photographers are more interested in the camera and the process of taking pictures than in the photographs produced—this work focuses first on the iPhone camera and the camera apps. (This work also considers the writings of Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and W. J. T. Mitchell, as they pertain to photography and iPhoneography.) It traces the beginning of the nostalgic photograph style to 2008, when the Apple App Store offered apps that behaved like toy cameras and rendered images similar to those produced by toy and Polaroid cameras. The Hipstamatic app set the trend in 2009, and Instagram made it mainstream. Nostalgia is more a source of inspiration and creativity than a source of melancholy and longing for the past. The iPhoneography community on Facebook tends to form small groups that share and curate specific topics, such as clouds, portraits, flowers, and images produced with Hipstamatic. A small survey of the iPhoneography community shows that the community considers iPhoneography an art.

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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.

Critical interpretations of the work of Mario Giacomelli often disagree as to whether he should be classified within the style of Italian neorealism. This thesis argues that Giacomelli's photography strikes a balance between realism and abstraction that is best explained as neorealist. Neorealist films such as Rome, Open City (1945) and Bicycle Thieves (1948) sought to capture the social realities of postwar Italy. The realism in these films is complicated however, subjecting postwar social actuality to the artistic initiative of the director. I seek to identify the filmic qualities in Giacomelli's work to clarify a connection to neorealism. Though Giacomelli physically manipulated his images, these manipulations give his images the appearance of a film. To reveal Giacomelli's connection to neorealism, I will investigate the cinematic qualities of mise-en-scene, montage and narrative. This thesis will argue that Giacomelli's photography stems from a cinematic approach that was first developed in neorealism.

A pesquisa, com título inicial de Errância e Idiorritmia Fotografias, buscou aplicar uma proposta metodológica baseada sobretudo (mas não apenas) no diálogo com as obras LEspace Littéraire, do ensaísta Maurice Blanchot autor no qual a errância é discutida como eixo de uma prática que desconhece seu ponto de chegada e que não abdica de sua força motora irredutível (ainda que por vezes desconhecida) , e com o seminário Comment Vivre Ensemble, de Roland Barthes, em que o termo idiorritmia é empregado para uma discussão sobre a individuação da linguagem. O trabalho procurou aproximar-se dessas considerações teóricas para desenvolver um método ensaístico e prático de produção em fotografia. / Originally titled as Errance and Idiorhythm Photographs, the research looked to apply a methodology mainly based (but not only) in the dialogue with the works LEspace Littéraire, by the essayist Maurice Blanchot in which the author discusses the errance as the axis of a practice that knows your destination and that do not abdicate of its driving and irreducible force (though sometimes unknown) as well as the Roland Barthes seminar Comment Vivre Ensemble, in which the term idiorhythm is introduced to discuss the individuation of the language. This work tried to approach these theoretical considerations to develop an essayistical and practical method of producing.