UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines photography's relationship to beliefs in universal order, and the emergence of a photographic "world picture" in art. It argues that the concept of a "taken" picture arises with empirical scientific methods in the early eighteenth century, and ties the "taken" pictures of four artists in the early modern and contemporary eras to the emergence of period worldviews: Canaletto's paintings to Newtonian mechanics, Bernd and Hilla Becher's typologies to structuralism, and Andreas Gursky's large-scale digital photographs to globalization.

Chapter 1 uncovers the "taken" picture's origins as a commodity in Canaletto's paintings of 1730s Venice, and shows how they were made to seem to British tourists like observations through Isaac Newton's eyes--cut from a mechanically homogenous world. Canaletto's paintings, executed through the lens of a camera obscura, "captured" moments of space and time by analogizing the artistic act of "taking views" to the scientific act of "taking samples." Chapter 2 follows Canaletto to London, where the artist creates the first view paintings of an endless built world. The chapter shows how these massive cityscapes evoke a cultural sublime before the advent of sublime paintings of nature. These paintings anticipate the form and scale of Andreas Gursky's digital photographs of globalization by more than two centuries and also presage modern skepticism of Enlightenment humanism: how, they ask, can a human observer see himself as part of universal, deterministic system? Chapter 3 shows how Bernd and Hilla Becher's typologies of industrial buildings photographically answered that question when they were adopted into the conceptual art world of the late 1960s and 1970s. The chapter reveals that the Bechers' pictorial formula helped viewers experience their own faculties being as mechanically determined as those of the industrial buildings--just as structuralism and computational cognitive science were then predicting. Finally, in Chapter 4, I demonstrate how Andreas Gursky turned the intangible concept of "globalization" into a photographic experience through digital imaging technology. Gursky arrived at a "photographic world picture" by seeming to have taken a photograph of a systematic fallout to our individual intentions, spread over an indefinite landscape. In doing so, he discovered what Canaletto was looking for in London--a place in the built landscape from which global logic could be observed. The four chapters of this dissertation show how photography gave visual form to notions of universal structural order.