The research component, "Body and Soul", is an interdisciplinary, comparative study of the essay form, focusing on the Weimar period. The essay is a marginal literary genre, which, like much documentary style photography, attempts "the imaginative recreation of a culture, a period or an individual". August Sander's photographic opus, People of the 20th Century and Robert Musil's essayistic novel, The Man Without Qualities invite comparison as complex and problematic portraits of their respective societies. Sander's typological portraits are well known and his legacy informs much of contemporary documentary photography. Sixty images were published in 1929 by Kurt Wolff, Transmare Verlag, Munich, as Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time) with an introduction by Alfred D??blin. The rust two volumes of Robert Musil's, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities), were published in 1930 and 1932 by Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg. Recent publication of new editions of both Musil's and Sander's works prompted the attempt to reconcile two portraits of people and events of the early decades of the 20th Century in Germany and Austria. The essay form in literature and the documentary style in photography are examined with regard to the polemic associated with truth and reality. This review attempts to illustrate the inevitable inclusion of the fictional element into the fabric of both forms of investigation. The study concludes with a review of contemporary art practice in photo-documentary and some thoughts on future developments. The studio component, "Dargan", is a photographic essay of a site in the Blue Mountains West of Sydney. Focusing on relics of industrial activity in the region, and their effects on the landscape, large format colour photographs were produced to establish a documentary style body of work for exhibition as large-scale colour analogue prints. The work is the response to a need to engage with the Australian landscape and to establish a sustainable practice that recognises and takes into account an ambivalent relationship with "country".
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/258406 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Clarke, Warwick, Media Arts, College of Fine Arts, UNSW |
| Publisher | Publisher:University of New South Wales. Media Arts |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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