The interwar period produced several important aesthetic developments significant to photography, including the New Vision in Germany, and Surrealism in France. Germaine Krull and Eli Lotar, two photographers independently associated with these two movements, converged in Paris in the late 1920s. This study considers the artists' career-defining projects in tandem: Krull's images of fragmented architecture in her series M�tal and Lotar's "Abattoir" photographs of corporeal order in slaughterhouses. I begin with an investigation of the body in the work of Krull in order to assess her hybridization of photographic genres and methods, as seen through Rosalind Krauss's concept of the double in surrealist photography. I then turn to Krull's intimate partnership with Lotar and their shared interest in photographic projects related to the body and the machine. Their relationship, as lovers and collaborators, defies the previously held historiographical separation between the photographers, and in turn, collapses larger art historical categories.

This dissertation examines the photography-centered practice of American artist Sarah Charlesworth (1947–2013). Charlesworth, like many of her mostly female peers, began appropriating mass media images in the 1970s to address issues of representation, particularly the patriarchal and political power of images in the public realm. She has become overwhelmingly associated with the postmodern “pictures” artists, often referred to as the so-called “Pictures Generation,” a term originating from art historian Douglas Crimp’s landmark 1977 exhibition Pictures at Artists Space, New York, and curator Douglas Eklund’s 2009 exhibition The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. However, Charlesworth’s own appropriations engaged not only in critique, but also in connection and exchange. Her exacting work is not divorced from modernism, paying specific attention to photography’s lineages and legacies—qualities often overshadowed by Charlesworth’s historicization within a Pictures context.Mine is a photo-historical account, focusing on form and materiality, and engaging with photographic, literary, and feminist theory. Important here are Charlesworth’s close connections with Roland Barthes (1915–80), especially with Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980/81), and the two’s similar views on photography, absence, and loss. Also important are literary scholar Jane Gallop’s feminist theories of jouissance, notably her writings on Barthes’s use of the term and its relationship to female agency and creativity. Like Barthes, Charlesworth found pleasure in process and particulars, seeing photography as both problematic and a thing of beauty and relation. This dissertation finds three distinct chronological periods in Charlesworth’s work. Chapter One considers the artist’s early years (1972–80), when she employed found images from newspapers, press photos, and magazines, using subtractive strategies such as excision, omission, masking, and displacement. Chapter Two (1981–89) addresses Charlesworth’s subsequent focus on additive processes: layering, accumulation, amalgamation, and collage/montage. Chapter Three looks at Charlesworth’s shift to analog picture-taking in the 1990s, when she constructed three-dimensional scenes for the camera. Charlesworth’s practice expands on feminist and photographic histories, foregrounding material and process, absence and presence, critique and pleasure. Charlesworth’s “pictures” may indeed be better understood as “photographies,” a term she used to describe the medium’s multiple approaches and functions.