Rosler’s 1967-1972 series, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful conflates images of domestic interiors with images of combat related to the Vietnam War. This thesis places the series within the socio-political context of the Cold War examining the manner in which Rosler utilizes specific elements of governmental ideology and rhetoric to implicate the viewer in complicity with American involvement in Vietnam. The dissemination of governmental ideology through advertising, the effects of desire, and the critique of consumption conveyed by this series are investigated. The series is analyzed in terms of Sigmund Freud’s theory of the Uncanny and in relation to historic use of photomontage. In the final chapter, Rosler’s revival of the series, begun in 2004, is compared to the original in terms of its ability to effectively alter the viewer’s perception of the war in Iraq in terms of politics, media, and institutional context.

Interpretations of the Politics of Fictive Landscapes in Context: A Comparison of Allan Sekula's Sketch on a Geography Lesson and Martha Rosler's In the Place of the Public Airport Series Throughout this thesis project I examine the geopolitical context(s) of the photographs featured in Martha Rosler's 'In the Place of the Public Airport Series' (1983) and Allan Sekula's series, 'Sketch on a Geography Lesson' (1982). I investigate the manner in which they question the legitimacy of the genre of documentary photography within the post-modern age by emphasizing the documentation of an actual physical place, presenting an alternative to the post-modern notion of photograph merely as another component of simulacra, or the intentional creation of an image without meaning or origin. By looking at photographs that Rosler and Sekula made during the burgeoning stages of post-modern theory, presents a broader interpretation of the development of Marxist documentary photography from the early 1980's to today. One way in which I dialogue with the discourse surrounding documentary photography in the 1980's is to focus on Rosler's and Sekula's intentional choice of material that emphasizes the political dialogue rather than concepts that are abstract and maintain no reference to real life. Furthermore, the period of the 1980's is considered a point in contemporary art history when the political fervor of the 1960's and early 1970's diminished greatly. Departing from this trend, Rosler's and Sekula's work continues to address political ideas throughout the 1980's, creating a bridge to today's photographers, such as Edward Burtynsky and Andreas Gursky who consider aesthetics from a socio-political perspective. / Art History