Bibliography: pages 109-111. / Dispossession, aspects of conflict and the breakdown of the relationship between people and their environment is the subject of this thesis. The body of work presented consists of twenty-four photographs and sixteen screen-printed off-set lithographs (referred to as the prints). The photographs are largely intended to introduce and contextualize the prints which act as the main body and conclusion of the thesis. In the series of prints I have manipulated certain photographic imagery in order to explore the ways in which meaning can shift with changes in context, and reveal associations not apparent in the original photographs. This book is divided into four sections: 1. Sources and context: This section contains a brief outline of the historical tradition of apocalyptic literature and its relevance to our times, as well as a discussion of some of the literary texts to which I have referred. All the visual source material for my prints was derived from my own photographs. As a result, I have not looked to other artist's works for reference, or for the development of my theme. Of great importance, however, were the texts I read during the course of my study, which included a wide and diverse range of literature and poetry. I have also looked to film as a source, including popular cinema such as George Miller's "Mad Max" series, as well as the more serious aspects of cinema, for example, the films of Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders. While my prints do not necessarily fall within the mainstream of apocalyptic, they have in common with it, a particular attitude towards the present. It is the vision of imminent chaos and the desire for a return to a restored natural order that has informed my work. 2. My working methods and their implications: This section contains an explication of the processes involved in the making of the prints, and the manner in which these processes contributed to the meaning of the images. Also included is a discussion of the relationship between my photography and my printmaking. 3. Introduction to the work: This section introduces my theme. In my photographs I have documented those aspects of southern African urban and rural landscape which reveal evidence of the erosion of the natural environment, as well as the physical manifestations of displacement. In my prints, I have disintegrated, translated and recontextualised these images. While the theme of my work lies within the broad context of apocalyptic, it is the individual's conflicts and sense of displacement within that context that has been of particular interest to me. As the apocalypticist expressed the tensions and conflicts of his time in a language of symbols, so I have similarly presented a response to my environment. It is not my intention in this section to present an interpretation of my work, but rather to highlight those aspects important to an understanding of the motives I had in making the images. In addition, this book includes documentation of the photographs and prints, preparatory sketches and collages, reproductions of source photographs, and a selection of literary texts which informed the work.

published_or_final_version / Fine Arts / Master / Master of Philosophy

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2007. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 38-39).

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2008. / Typescript. Accompanying CD-ROM includes JPG versions of the thesis photographs. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 28-29).

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2009. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 25-26).

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2009. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 48-50).

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 38).

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2007. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 40).

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.

Photographic, film and video representations of dying and dead subjects bring to light delicate balancing acts of agency involving representational perspective. In this thesis, I examine contemporary, lens-based artworks by Sarah Charlesworth, Eric Fischl (whose sculptural medium is an exception), Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, Gillian Wearing, Andres Serrano, Nan Goldin, AA Bronson and Jorge Zontal, as well as works by photojournalists Richard Drew and Theresa Frare, to show how they effectively convey facets of identity to dying and dead subjects. The voice, visuality, touch and embodiment (in particular, the body's weight and its materiality) are considered dimensions of intersubjectivity in order to explore how they foster access to the dying or the dead. My hypothesis is that, despite the avenues of intersubjective agency that appear to be foreclosed to the dying and the dead, the artists negotiate the following, significant challenges: how to bear witness to suffering without enacting visual mastery; how to grant a voice to or engage in dialogue with a silenced subject; how to touch the other without inflicting injury. Through the artists' divergent representational paradigms, the terms of intersubjectivity will be shown to equally involve the potential for reverence as well as for representational violence and it is upon this duality that the ethical concern hinges. The degrees of photographic transparency invoked by the artists alter the emergence of identity and the extent to which it reflects the perspective of the dying and the dead or, alternatively, becomes a framework of distortion. In terms of subject matter, the causes of death to the subjects represented, all of which are non-fictional, are AIDS-related illness, falling from buildings and violence (sometimes self-inflicted). Conceptually, I will be relying upon the phenomenological models of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the photographic theories of Roland Barthes, the feminist met