Abstract not available.

From Dadaist photomontages of the early twentieth century to photo-collages like those of Barbara Kruger, artists and academics alike have been interested in the relationship between words and images, exploring how they function together to create and complicate meaning(s). But what happens when our analyses of such text/image works of art—specifically the photo-collages of Barbara Kruger and the photographs of Gillian Wearing and Sharon Hayes—also consider the public spaces in which those artworks circulate? How might our understandings of these artworks—their meaning, function, and potential for enacting socio-political change within a public sphere—shift if we move beyond discussing them in terms of content and form, and instead explore the various roles (i.e. the photographer, photographed subject(s), and whom the work addresses) involved in the photographic act or encounter?

The works of Barbara Kruger, Gillian Wearing, and Sharon Hayes each demonstrate unique approaches to the medium of photography, its incorporation of language, and their relationship to the performative construction of publics. Yet, these artists’ photo-works also remain grounded in the politics of their viewing publics and illustrate a shared history of art and photography. For example, there are a number of commonalities across the photo-collages of Kruger, Wearing’s photographs, and Hayes’s photographic “documentation”—specifically, the text/image legacy of modernism, the use of photography within a social situation, and the role of the “caption” in pinning down meaning. However, the works of Kruger, Wearing, and Hayes also reveal that publics, with specific historical locations (Kruger’s postmodern 1980s America, Wearing’s early 1990s London, and Hayes’s turn of the century New York City), are shaped within an ever-changing public sphere. As theoretical entities within a space they (re: publics) remain constant, but the particularities of a public subjectivity within a public sphere are also always in flux. In examining the performative and public aspects of Kruger, Wearing, and Hayes’s work we can better understand how these photographs address underlying socio-political issues of their time, as well as how their creation and circulation correspond to shifting understandings of publics that although complex and sometimes contradictory, are also somewhat tangible within the space of the public sphere. This project demonstrates the inherently political and performative function(s) of photography as a medium, and proposes that there is generative (counterhegemonic) potential within the abstract, complex entity of a public.

Abstract not available.

A Language of Rebuilt Reality: The Photography of Robert Cumming in the 1970s explores the artist's development from sculptor to photographer, his move to Southern California, and the elements of the area that inspired his fabricated tableaux and imaginary scenarios that engage plays on perception, absurdity, and humor.

This thesis will examine the history of color photography in America, with specific attention to the exhibition and review of color photography across the country in the 1970s. The first chapter looks at recent exhibitions and texts on the topic, identifying their common shortcoming as the focus on the exhibition and review of color photography in New York City in the 1970s, and the use of New York exhibition and review of color photo as a stand-in for understandings of color photography throughout America. Through case a series of case studies: William Eggleston in New York, William Christenberry in Washington D.C., and John Divola in Los Angeles, this thesis will reevaluates the significance Eggleston’s 1976 MoMA exhibition and offers examples of color’s acceptance and embrace by institutions and critics outside the New York context.

The aim of my project is to refocus on Garry Winogrand's airport pictures as a significant facet, both theoretically and corporeally, of the photographer's archive. I will argue that Winogrand's airport pictures are central to understanding his overall body of work. These images focus on bodies in space, not merely bodies in the street, and allow us to reassess Winogrand's work in terms of a monumental paradigm shift in popular culture in 1960s America.

The mid-nineteenth-century witnessed innovations in imagery and medical science, and the histories of photography and medicine intersected. The invention of the daguerreotype was announced in 1839 and methods of reproducing photographs emerged shortly thereafter. At around the same time, the operating table welcomed modifications in surgical procedures, including the introduction of ether anesthesia in the 1840s. Furthermore, diagnostic methods shifted from textual to visual, as physicians relied heavily on carefully observing their patients with what Michel Foucault later termed the "medical gaze." Photography became an essential component to document medical successes and disseminate clinical knowledge. Acknowledgements of the inherent subjectivity of photography, however, conflicted with objective understandings of these images. With a focus on American photography and medicine, the central aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that a simultaneous reading of medical photographs from a medical gaze and a highlight of subjectivity through an art historical approach does not undercut the significance of either perspective. Instead, this combined reading unveils how photography bolstered the reputation of surgery among a nineteenth-century crowd that normally tethered agony and fatality to operations, as well as shaped a history of surgery that is uniquely American.

This thesis examines the role of Robert Adams series The New West in the history of landscape photography of the American West. Adams turns his camera away from the traditional subjects such as national parks and turns toward the places where people that actually live and that have violated by uncontrolled sprawl. In his attempt to critique both the history of landscape photography of the American West and critique the man-altered landscape, Adams continues to aestheticize and romanticize the landscape.

Since the 1970s a movement called classical realism has grown across North America and Europe. Classical realist painters reject modern and contemporary art in favor of traditional academic painterly practices. This thesis investigates the origins and implications of the presence of this movement within the context of art education. This paper considers the role of pastiche in the philosophy of the classical realist movement, the similarities and differences between the 21st century classical realist atelier and academies of the past, and the ways in which the atelier offers a simplified alternative model of education in the face of contradictory art educational models. Citing work by Howard Singerman, James Elkins, and Nicholas Houghton, this thesis builds on commentary about the role of education in shaping the artist and the art world. In this case, classical realism provides a window into larger issues at stake in both art education and the contemporary art world.