Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio State University. / Bibliography: leaves 59-60. Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1989. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

Guided by the question of what does photography bring into being, 'Against Indexicality' is a proposition to rethink the foundation of the philosophy of photography - to rethink the supposed relation of truth between the photograph and the world. Taking Indexicality as a messy and convoluted conceptual field comprised of the notions of pointing, stillness, and fragmentation, this study works to untangle the three from each other, separately challenging each individual notion. In analysing each of the three through their conceptualisation by prominent thinkers, including Charles S. Peirce, Susan Sontag, Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, André Bazin, Rosalind Krauss, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes, and examining them against and through examples of photographic images, this study points to the imprecisions, insufficiencies, and incompatibilities of Indexicality in relation to the photographic image and form. Undoing Indexicality as a field, this study resists Indexicality as a paradigm, proposing a new theoretical framework for photography: rather than looking at photographic images as truth bearers that can evidence the photographed, it proposes to look at photographic images as formations that form a thought out of the photographed. In that, this study works to remedy the Indexicality fever, or compulsion, which it identifies as the root cause of theoretical mess within the philosophy of photography. By evincing that Indexicality is a wrong, albeit necessary, solution to a problem that is to do with identifying the relation of the photograph to the world, it not only lifts photography out of a Procrustean bed in which it was never comfortable, but also allows for a new solution to develop. This solution is the theory of photo-poiesis: a move beyond the materiality and away from the referentiality of photography towards its being in the world and the thought that it forms and brings-forth - towards thinking.

Thesis (M.A.)--Bowling Green State University, 2008. / Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 43 p. : ill. (some col.) Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Michigan State University. Media and Information Studies, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on July 23, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 218-234). Also issued in print.

No description available.

This project explores two main lines of inquiry concerning representations of ruins in Paris. I first identify a turning point in the evolution of the ruin leitmotif beyond Romanticism in its transfer into a new context: modern Paris. The analysis demonstrates the correlation between this leitmotif and urban environment in transformation, and their influence on aesthetics, leading to the renewal of modes of representation in literary and visual discourse. Unconventional ruins, recently created by demolition during Haussmannisation (1853-70) or war (1870-71) challenge conceptions about space (inside/outside, up/down, visible/invisible), time, and the individual in relation to the city. In view of tracing the transformation of the ruin ethos in relation to modern sensibilities towards the city and its modes of representation, a chronological approach concentrates on two main periods divided into four chapters. The first interval extends from 1848 throughout the Second Empire and the second spans the 1870-1871 conflagration and the Third Republic. An interdisciplinary and dialogic approach reveals the exchanges between different media (literature, journalism, painting, photography) aiming to convey the paradoxes of Paris's modern ruins. Moreover, close reading and comparisons of authors' and artists' depictions across media and genres nuance, correct or disprove critical appraisals, re-establishing artistic authority (e.g. photographers Charles Marville and Bruno Braquehais). The second line of inquiry posits that representations of ruins reflect on the relationship of Parisians with their city during systematisation and wartime destruction. Research reveals that individual initiatives of representing urban ruins attest to a new sensibility towards the city, preceding the Second Empire's (1853-1870) apparatus of historical and topographic documentation to preserve the appearance of spaces before intervention. Thus, during Paris's systematisation, private and artistically-minded projects become the tools of patrimonial preservation. By comparison, aesthetic approaches to ruins in 1871 mark a new appreciation of modern architecture, while engaging with war trauma.