UCLA

This thesis examines the relationship between the work of Pablo Picasso and photography in the period dating roughly 1901-1913. More specifically, it is a study of the artist’s simultaneous acceptance and rejection of photography within his pasted paper collages or papiers coll�s. Despite using photography for various purposes during this period, Picasso excised any trace of it from his papiers coll�s. His relationship to photography is therefore paradoxical: on the one hand, we see his methodical employment of the medium, and on the other, we are witness to his conscious suppression of it. I will argue that this paradox occurred for many reasons; namely, prior to the advent of the papier coll�, Picasso dismissed photography as an art form yet exploited photographic qualities such as capture, inversion, cropping, reproduction and circulation as models for his artwork. Picasso’s use of photography as a formal and conceptual model in part paved the way toward the papier coll�’s decisive rupture between Analytic Cubism and Synthetic Cubism. Moreover, I will argue that Picasso’s papiers coll�s are not solely defined by a resistance to photography but that they function as photography by other means.