Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Landscape photography – Australia – History'
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Watson, David Rowan Scott. "Precious Little: Traces of Australian Place and Belonging." University of Sydney, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1098.
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Master of Visual ArtsThe Dissertation is a meditation on our relationship with this continent and its layered physical and psychological ‘landscapes’. It explores ways in which artists and writers have depicted our ‘thin’ but evolving presence here in the South, and references my own photographic work. The paper weaves together personal tales with fiction writing and cultural, settler and indigenous history. It identifies a uniquely Australian sense of 21st-century disquiet and argues for some modest aesthetic and social antidotes. It discusses in some detail the suppression of focus in photography, and suggests that the technique evokes not only memory, but a recognition of absence, which invites active participation (as the viewer attempts to ‘place’ and complete the picture). In seeking out special essences of place the paper considers the suburban poetics of painter Clarice Beckett, the rigorous focus-free oeuvre of photographer Uta Barth, and the hybrid vistas of artist/gardener Peter Hutchinson and painter Dale Frank. Interwoven are the insights of contemporary authors Gerald Murnane, W G Sebald and Paul Carter. A speculative chapter about the fluidity of landscape, the interconnectedness of land and sea, and Australia’s ‘deep’ geology fuses indigenous spirituality, oceanic imaginings of Australia, the sinuous bush-scapes of Patrick White, and the poetics of surfing. Full immersion is recommended.
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Watson, David Rowan Scott. "Precious Little: Traces of Australian Place and Belonging." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1098.
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The Dissertation is a meditation on our relationship with this continent and its layered physical and psychological ‘landscapes’. It explores ways in which artists and writers have depicted our ‘thin’ but evolving presence here in the South, and references my own photographic work. The paper weaves together personal tales with fiction writing and cultural, settler and indigenous history. It identifies a uniquely Australian sense of 21st-century disquiet and argues for some modest aesthetic and social antidotes. It discusses in some detail the suppression of focus in photography, and suggests that the technique evokes not only memory, but a recognition of absence, which invites active participation (as the viewer attempts to ‘place’ and complete the picture). In seeking out special essences of place the paper considers the suburban poetics of painter Clarice Beckett, the rigorous focus-free oeuvre of photographer Uta Barth, and the hybrid vistas of artist/gardener Peter Hutchinson and painter Dale Frank. Interwoven are the insights of contemporary authors Gerald Murnane, W G Sebald and Paul Carter. A speculative chapter about the fluidity of landscape, the interconnectedness of land and sea, and Australia’s ‘deep’ geology fuses indigenous spirituality, oceanic imaginings of Australia, the sinuous bush-scapes of Patrick White, and the poetics of surfing. Full immersion is recommended.
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Willis, Anne-Marie. "Writing photographic history in Australia : towards a critical account." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 1986. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/28611.
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This thesis presents a critical framework for historically considering photography in Australia from the 1840s to the 1970s. The approach adopted is to critically map the currently constituted field of photographic history by taking the existing accounts of photography in Australia and the key issues of photographic history as a series of starting points. These are presented, then interrogated by setting them into new evaluative contexts.
The basic claim of the thesis, presented in the Introduction, is for the necessity of considering and recognising the constitution of photography in the broadest possible terms, and of addressing "the photographic" as it is located at, and formed within, a diversity of social, economic and cultural sites.
Prior to the activity of writing a critical photographic history which maps developments in Australia, photographic history writing itself is problematised. This is proposed in the Introduction and developed in Chapter One, which presents a survey and critical assessment of the different modes, to date, by which photographic history has been produced in Australia.
Chapters Two to Ten historically substantiate the main argument of the thesis by presenting a selective, contextualised and chronological account of photography in Australia. The medium is considered as a professional and amateur practice which intersects with and is deployed by a range of institutions and discourses including those of science, the popular press, the instruments of the state and the aesthetically validated spheres of the visual.
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Swensen, James R. "The Rephotographic Survey Project (19770-1979) and the Landscape of Photography." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/194916.
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In 1976 two young photographers, Mark Klett and JoAnn Verburg, and a photo-historian named Ellen Manchester came together with an idea to rephotograph sites in the American West that had originally been documented by survey photographers such as William Henry Jackson and Timothy O'Sullivan. By the spring of 1977 and with the support of various organizations they began a project that spanned the next three years and would eventually become known as the Rephotographic Survey Project (RSP). In many ways, the RSP represents an important moment in the history of photography and the representation of the American West. Through analysis of their work, archival documents, contemporary sources, and interviews with the original members of the RSP and several others, this dissertation examines the activities of the project and its various members, which also included Gordon Bushaw and Rick Dingus. More than the RSP, this dissertation also focuses on the growing culture of photography that boomed in the 1970s. Photography was no longer seen as an outsider to the world of art but was benefiting from newfound opportunities and growth. Without such a culture, this work argues, it would not have been possible for the RSP to take place. By the end of their project, however, photography was undergoing another important transition as modernism was giving way to the more critical climate of postmodernism. When the RSP finally published their work In 1984, their project and the community of photography that fostered their ideas was undergoing profound changes. This study also closely examines the RSP's fieldwork in the American West and the various discourses that the project encountered in this meaningful space. Like photography, the West was undergoing significant changes that the RSP was able to observe and document. Through their process that matched images from the past with photographs of their present, the RSP was able to record diverse landscapes that had or had not changed over the subsequent century. Furthermore, it also provided insight into the ways in which the West had been represented and perceived over time and in a new history of the West.
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Riddler, Eric. "Sublime souls & symphonies : Australian phototexts, 1926-1966." Master's thesis, University of Sydney, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/14449.
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Dracup, Liza. "Photographic strategies for visualising the landscape and natural history of Northern England : the ordinary and the extraordinary." Thesis, University of Sunderland, 2017. http://sure.sunderland.ac.uk/7467/.
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This critical commentary reviews and contextualises existing research on Photographic strategies for visualising the landscape and natural history of Northern England: the ordinary and the extraordinary. The commentary examines three major bodies of photographic work that have each been publicly disseminated as major exhibitions, Sharpe’s Wood (2007) nominated for the Prix Pictet (Earth) Photography Award (2009), Chasing the Gloaming (2011) nominated for the Deutsche Börse and Re: Collections (2013). Each case study has been subject to critical peer and public review and this is evaluated in the commentary and a comprehensive box of evidential research material is presented to support the practice-led research submission. The commentary positions the practice-led enquiry against the overall research aims and objectives. The research focus has made a significant contribution to landscape photographic discourse, through experimental and transformational analogue and digital photographic methodologies (camera and non-camera) in the visualisation of the hidden and unseen aspects of the landscape and natural history of the north of England. The commentary frames and highlights the wide-ranging historical collections based research across photographic, artistic and science disciplines, and it tracks their impact on the research trajectory and on my contemporary photographic practice. Photographic critical thinking (Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes) supported the theoretical research aims; their ideas provided critical filters for practice-led experiments with camera and non-camera seeing and the aim of visualising the hidden through experimental photographic methodologies. Historical and contemporary nature writing also informed the photographic research trajectory, specifically with ideas around the locale within a wider cultural context and ideas around the (lost) meaning of landscape. The resulting research outputs have culminated in an examination of the wider cultural value of the ordinary and the local landscape visualised photographically.
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Wang, Han-Chih. "The Profane and Profound: American Road Photography from 1930 to the Present." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2017. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/468625.
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Art HistoryPh.D.
This dissertation historicizes the enduring marriage between photography and the American road trip. In considering and proposing the road as a photographic genre with its tradition and transformation, I investigate the ways in which road photography makes artistic statements about the road as a visual form, while providing a range of commentary about American culture over time, such as frontiersmanship and wanderlust, issues and themes of the automobile, highway, and roadside culture, concepts of human intervention in the environment, and reflections of the ordinary and sublime, among others. Based on chronological order, this dissertation focuses on the photographic books or series that depict and engage the American road. The first two chapters focus on road photographs in the 1930s and 1950s, Walker Evans’s American Photographs, 1938; Dorothea Lange’s An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, 1939; and Robert Frank’s The Americans, 1958/1959. Evans dedicated himself to depicting automobile landscapes and the roadside. Lange concentrated on documenting migrants on the highway traveling westward to California. By examining Frank’s photographs and comparing them with photographs by Evans and Lange, the formal and contextual connections and differences between the photographs in these two decades, the 1930s and the 1950s, become evident. Further analysis of the many automobile and highway images from The Americans manifests Frank’s commentary on postwar America during his cross-country road trip—the drive-in theater, jukebox, highway fatality, segregation, and social inequality. Chapter 3 analyzes Ed Ruscha’s photographic series related to driving and the roadside, including Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1962 and Royal Road Test, 1967. The chapter also looks at Lee Friedlander’s photographs taken on the road into the mid-1970s. Although both were indebted to the earlier tradition of Evans and Frank, Ruscha and Friedlander took different directions, representing two sets of artistic values and photographic approaches. Ruscha manifested the Pop art and Conceptualist affinity, while Friedlander exemplified the snapshot yet sophisticated formalist style. Chapter 4 reexamines road photographs of the 1970s and 1980s with emphasis on two road trip series by Stephen Shore. The first, American Surfaces, 1972 demonstrates an affinity of Pop art and Frank’s snapshot. Shore’s Uncommon Places, 1982, regenerates the formalist and analytical view exemplified by Evans with a large 8-by-10 camera. Shore’s work not only illustrates the emergence of color photography in the art world but also reconsiders the transformation of the American landscape, particularly evidenced in the seminal exhibition titled New Topographics: A Man-Altered Landscape, 1975. I also compare Shore’s work with the ones by his contemporaries, such as Robert Adams, William Eggleston, and Joel Sternfeld, to demonstrate how their images share common ground but translate nuanced agendas respectively. By reintroducing both Evans’s and Frank’s legacies in his work, Shore more consciously engaged with this photographic road trip tradition. Chapter 5 investigates a selection of photographic series from 1990 to the present to revisit the ways in which the symbolism of the road evolves, as well as how artists represent the driving and roadscapes. These are evident in such works as Catherine Opie’s Freeway Series, 1994–1995; Andrew Bush’s Vector Portraits, 1989–1997; Martha Rosler’s The Rights of Passage, 1995; and Amy Stein’s Stranded, 2010. Furthermore, since the late 1990s, Friedlander developed a series titled America by Car, 2010, incorporating the driving vision taken from the inside seat of a car. His idiosyncratic inclusion of the side-view mirror, reflections, and self-presence is a consistent theme throughout his career, embodying a multilayered sense of time and place: the past, present, and future, as well as the inside space and outside world of a car. Works by artists listed above exemplify that road photography is a complex and ongoing interaction of observation, imagination, and intention. Photographers continue to re-enact and reformulate the photographic tradition of the American road trip.
Temple University--Theses
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Campbell, Rachel. "Peter Sculthorpe's Irkanda period, 1954-1965: music, nationalism, 'aboriginality' and landscape." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/12869.
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Peter Sculthorpe’s Irkanda Period, 1954-1965: Music, Nationalism, ‘Aboriginality’ and Landscape Peter Sculthorpe began writing what he considered to be truly Australian music in the mid1950s. Many audience members, critics and culture industry personnel also heard it as Australian. Sculthorpe’s place in Australian music has subsequently been very prominent, beginning in the early 1960s during his Irkanda period. The period takes its name from his works Irkanda I - IV, their name borrowed from an Aboriginal word meaning “scrub country” that Sculthorpe variously translated as “the huge scrub-country of Central Australia,” “an austere and lonely place” and “a remote and lonely place.” This thesis is a study of the Irkanda-period works on which Sculthorpe’s initial reception was based: the origin of his dominant nationalist project, of significance in both his oeuvre and the history of Australian music. These musical representations of aspects of Aboriginal ‘folklore’ and central Australian landscapes have received significant popular and academic attention. However, many accounts have been shaped by what is identified as a culturally nationalist historiography evident in much of the commentary on Australian music and culture from the mid1960s. This thesis addresses some of the distorting effects of this historiography, through biographical analysis, music analysis and source study. An overarching aim is to analyse the music and reception of Sculthorpe’s Irkanda works in detail to address the question of what it was that audiences found plausibly Australian about them. Sculthorpe’s Irkanda music draws on longstanding representational traditions in classical and entertainment genres of musical exoticism, landscape, and ‘primitivism.’ His work is strongly connected with contemporary non-indigenous Australian cultural expressions of landscape and ‘Aboriginality.’ The relationship of his work with these contexts is explored, as is the nationalist basis of his music and its context within wider Australian and transnational cultural traditions. Keywords Peter Sculthorpe’s Irkanda Period, 1954-1965: Music, Nationalism, ‘Aboriginality’ and Landscape Peter Sculthorpe began writing what he considered to be truly Australian music in the mid1950s. Many audience members, critics and culture industry personnel also heard it as Australian. Sculthorpe’s place in Australian music has subsequently been very prominent, beginning in the early 1960s during his Irkanda period. The period takes its name from his works Irkanda I - IV, their name borrowed from an Aboriginal word meaning “scrub country” that Sculthorpe variously translated as “the huge scrub-country of Central Australia,” “an austere and lonely place” and “a remote and lonely place.” This thesis is a study of the Irkanda-period works on which Sculthorpe’s initial reception was based: the origin of his dominant nationalist project, of significance in both his oeuvre and the history of Australian music. These musical representations of aspects of Aboriginal ‘folklore’ and central Australian landscapes have received significant popular and academic attention. However, many accounts have been shaped by what is identified as a culturally nationalist historiography evident in much of the commentary on Australian music and culture from the mid1960s. This thesis addresses some of the distorting effects of this historiography, through biographical analysis, music analysis and source study. An overarching aim is to analyse the music and reception of Sculthorpe’s Irkanda works in detail to address the question of what it was that audiences found plausibly Australian about them. Sculthorpe’s Irkanda music draws on longstanding representational traditions in classical and entertainment genres of musical exoticism, landscape, and ‘primitivism.’ His work is strongly connected with contemporary non-indigenous Australian cultural expressions of landscape and ‘Aboriginality.’ The relationship of his work with these contexts is explored, as is the nationalist basis of his music and its context within wider Australian and transnational cultural traditions.
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Hodge, Pamela. "Fostering flowers: Women, landscape and the psychodynamics of gender in 19th Century Australia." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 1998. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/1435.
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It is said that when the Sphinx was carved into the bedrock of Egypt it had the head as well as the body of Sekhmet lioness Goddess who presided over the rise and fall of the Nile, and that only much later was the head recarved to resemble a male pharaoh. Simon Schama considered the 'making over' of Mount Rushmore to resemble America's Founding Fathers constituted 'the ultimate colonisation of nature by culture … a distinctly masculine obsession (expressing) physicality, materiality and empirical externality,… a rhetoric of humanity's uncontested possession of nature. It would be comforting to think that, although Uluru has become the focus of nationalist myths in Australia, to date it has not been incised to represent Australia's 'Great Men' - comforting that is, if it were not for the recognition that if Australia had had the resources available to America in the 1920s a transmogrified Captain Cook and a flinty Governor Phillip may have been eyeballing the red heart of Australia for the greater part of a century. My dissertation traces the conscious and unconscious construction of gender in Australian society in the nineteenth century as it was constructed through the apprehension of things which were associated with 'nature' -plants, animals, landscape, 'the bush', Aborigines, women. The most important metaphor in this construction was that of women as flowers; a metaphor which, in seeking to sacralise 'beauty' in women and nature, increasingly externalised women and the female principle and divorced them from their rootedness in the earth - the 'earth' of 'nature', and the 'earth' of men's and women's deeper physical and psychological needs. This had the consequence of a return of the repressed in the form of negative constructions of women, 'femininity'" and the land which surfaced in Australia, as it did in most other parts of the Western World, late in the nineteenth century. What I attempt to show in this dissertation is that a negative construction of women and the female principle was inextricably implicated in the accelerating development of a capitalist consumer society which fetishised the surface appearance of easily reproducible images of denatured objects. In the nineteenth century society denatured women along with much else as it turned from the worship of God and ‘nature' to the specularisation of endlessly proliferating images emptied of meaning; of spirituality. An increasing fascination with the appearance of things served to camouflage patriarchal assumptions which lopsidedly associated women with a 'flowerlike' femininity of passive receptivity (or a ‘mad' lasciviousness) and men with a 'masculinity' of aggressive achievement - and awarded social power and prestige to the latter. The psychological explanation which underlies this thesis and unites its disparate elements is that of Julia Kristeva who believed that in the nineteenth century fear of loss of the Christian 'saving' mother - the Mother of God - led to an intensification of emotional investment among men and women in the pre-oedipal all-powerful 'phallic' mother who is thought to stand between the individual and 'the void of nothingness'.
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Wang, Pengfei, and Jiayi Wang. "A Living Story of Parks : Urban History Research of Stockholmsskolan." Thesis, KTH, Urbana och regionala studier, 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-197633.
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Our thesis started with a continuous discovery of theory and observation. As a group work of landscape architect and architect, during the study of our Urbanism program, we were both curious about the urbanism theories within Europe. Among them, partly in terms of the landscape background, we were particularly interested in the theory of landscape urbanism and its practices in Europe. Spontaneously, this became our original thesis topic. However, after reading and collecting, we realized landscape urbanism theory was never as a main agenda in European academic world as in U.S. On the contrary, the role of landscape in urbanization is unignorable and has been examined for decades in Europe, which is one thing what landscape urbanists try to achieve. Moreover, during our reading of Swedish landscape and planning history, we noticed a series of significant parks which were built between 1930s-1950s, belong to a hardly forgotten design style named Stockholm School (Stockholmsskolan). This particular style and period of time is a fundamental part of Swedish landscape and planning history, deeply influenced the following park design as well as city planning in Stockholm. Almost all the parks of Stockholmsskolan nowadays become attractive spots for citizens gathering together, relaxing, and doing outdoor activities. Some of the parks are our personal favorite places in the city. Nevertheless, we choose this study not only to appreciate the significant parks but also to try to introduce them to other readers who might not be familiar with, especially to those who live outside of Europe with a different natural and cultural context. Our brief study could be the start of further research, and the tool of photography plays a key role in different stages of our thesis. As K.W. Gullers introduced Swedish lifestyle to the world through a photo about life in park seventy years ago, it would also be our honor if our booklet could interest readers to appreciate and rediscover the contemporary Swedish public space and urban life.
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Hoene, Katherine Anne. "Tracing the Romantic impulse in 19th-century landscape painting in the United States, Australia, and Canada." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/278748.
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The purpose of this thesis is to identify essential characteristics of the first generation of Romantic landscape painters and painting movements in a given English-speaking country which followed the generation of Turner, Constable and Martin in England, and then trace how the second generation of Romantic-realist painters represents a different paradigm. For a paradigmatic construct of the first generation, the focus is on the lives and major works of the American arch-Romantic landscape painter Thomas Cole (1801--1848) and the Australian Romantic landscape painter Conrad Martens (1801--1878). The second generation model features the American Frederic Edwin Church (1826--1900), the Australian William Charles Piguenit (1836--1914), and the British Canadian Lucius Richard O'Brien (1832--1899). Cole and Martens, closer to their predecessors in England, created dynamic paradigm shifts in their new countries. Following them, the second generation of Romantic-realists produced a synthesis of romanticism, scientific naturalism, and nationalistic symbolism.
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Heitz, Kaily A. "Making the Desert Bloom: Landscape Photography and Identity in the Owens Valley American West." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2014. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/pitzer_theses/50.
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This thesis analyzes the way in which landscape photography has historically been used as a colonialist tool to perpetuate narratives of control over the American West during the mid to late 1800s. I use this framework to interrogate how these visual narratives enforced ideas about American identity and whiteness relative to power over the landscape, indigenous people and the Japanese-Americans imprisoned at Manzanar within Owens Valley, California. I argue that because photographic representation is controlled by colonist powers, images of people within the American West reinforce imperialist rhetoric that positions whiteness in control of the land; thus, white settlers used this narrative to justify their stagnating agricultural development in the Owens Valley, Native Americans were documented as a part of the landscape to be controlled, and the internees at Manzanar were portrayed such that Japanese culture was obscured in favor of assimilationist, Americanizing tropes of their status as new pioneers on the American Frontier.
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Cooper, Robyn Elizabeth. "A 'Greater Britain' : the creation of an Imperial landscape, 1880-1914." Thesis, University of Leicester, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2381/28235.
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This thesis examines the representation of the settler societies of the British Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa were represented as a distinct part of the Empire, united by the idea that these parts of the Empire were ‘more British’ than the rest, and, had a shared heritage and culture and a predominant British settler population. It was represented as a landscape of opportunity built on layers of representations in the sources of the period from advertisements and panoramas to travel accounts and emigration literature. The settler societies were represented as a ‘Greater Britain’ or ‘Better Britains’, an imagining of the settler societies based on what the British wanted for themselves rather than as a true representation of four parts of the Empire. The notion of ‘Better Britains’ delves into British ideas of their past, present and future. If they were ‘better’, what were they improving on? What qualities and aspects of society were included and excluded? It was an idealised image but also flexible, a malleable landscape where the British could live out desires. Opportunity was found in the land, resources and climate, but also within the modernity of the cities and ideas of social advancement and of the freedom of the frontier.
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Stuart, Iain. "Squatting landscapes in south-eastern Australia (1820-1895)." Phd thesis, Prehistoric and Historic Archaeology Dept., Faculty of Arts, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/8715.
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Temperton, Barbara. "The Lighthouse keeper's wife, and other stories (novel) ; and Ceremony for ground : narrative, landscape, myth (dissertation)." University of Western Australia. English, Communication and Cultural Studies Discipline Group, 2007. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2008.0005.
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The focus of this project is on poetry, narrative, landscape and myth, and the palimpsest and/or hybridisation created when these four areas overlay each other. Our local communities' engagement with myth-making activity provides a golden opportunity for contemporary poets to continue the practice long established by our forebears of utilising folklore and legendary material as sources for poetry. Keeping in mind the words of M. H. Abrams who said
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Fang, Zihan 1962. "Chinese city parks: Political, economic and social influences on design (1949-1994)." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/278614.
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This thesis is an attempt to understand the purposes of modern Chinese park design. The goal of this work was to identify the social, economic, and political factors influencing contemporary park design. The primary approach was analysis of case studies. By analyzing characteristics of parks constructed at different stages in urban park history and in the cultural history of China, the results provide strong support for important political, economic, and social influences on park design.
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Conboy, Matthew L. "Mapping the Cultural Landscape: A Rephotographic Survey of W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1427825071.
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Roby, Ruth. "Imprint of a landscape a Yarrawa Brush story /." Access electronically, 2007. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/15.
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Feng, Yuexing. "40Ar/39Ar dating of young supergene Mn-Oxides : implication for late Cainozoic weathering history and landscape evolution, Mary Valley, Southeast Queensland, Australia /." [St. Lucia, Qld.], 2005. http://www.library.uq.edu.au/pdfserve.php?image=thesisabs/absthe19080.pdf.
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Deas, Megan Elizabeth. "Imagining Australia: Community, participation and the 'Australian Way of Life' in the photography of the Australian Women's Weekly, 1945-1956." Phd thesis, Canberra, ACT : The Australian National University, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/148424.
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While the cultural history and practices of press photography in Australia have gained scholarly attention in recent years, the contribution of other forms of photography published in magazines—including editorial, advertising and readers’ photographs—to burgeoning concepts of nationhood has been largely overlooked. This thesis examines the role of photography in visualising a post-war ‘imagined community’ in a study of The Australian Women’s Weekly magazine, the highest-circulating weekly publication in the country, between the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the introduction of television in 1956. In its examination of these photographs, the thesis asks: What narratives of national identity were evident in the photographs? What subject matter and framing techniques were frequently employed to construct a national photographic language? And what does this reveal about the values the Weekly’s publisher and editors attached to being Australian? I argue that the Weekly was not passively depicting or reflecting a national community and its ‘Way of Life’, but that it actively constructed an Australian identity through the thousands of photographs it published, while simultaneously instructing its readers what good citizenship looked like—and how to perform their belonging to the nation. Visual analysis of over 200 photographs highlights the predominant narratives during the period, including an emphasis on the practice of family photography to reinforce ideals of urban, family life as centred within the modern home. Representations of immigration and Aboriginal Australians, the repetition of photographs of families participating in community events, and a valorisation of the rural worker’s relationship with the land were intertwined with the concepts of ordinariness and of the ‘Australian Way of Life’. These core ideals were deployed to enable multiple and potentially oppositional narratives to coexist on the pages of the magazine. Analysis of a series of readers’ colour travel photographs published in the later years of the study foregrounds the Weekly’s encouragement of its readers as collaborators by providing them with an opportunity to demonstrate their performance of national identity. The magazine thus became a platform through which readers contributed to the visual narrative of Australianness, via the medium of photography as a form of participatory citizenship. The thesis foregrounds the implementation of a high-speed printing press in 1950 as a turning point at which readers saw a significant increase in the publication of colour photographs of native flora and fauna, and specifically photographs of ordinary Australians within the landscape. I argue that Alice Jackson and Esme Fenston, the Weekly’s editors during the period of study, positioned it as the mediator of knowledge about Australia, and constructed a relationship with readers based on notions of intimacy and authority. Situated within the multidisciplinary field of visual culture, and drawing from photography studies, visual anthropology, cultural history and media studies, the thesis highlights the cultural work of photography in the process of imaging, and imagining, post-war Australia.
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Wells, James Edward II. "Western landscapes, western images: a rephotography of U.S. Highway 89." Diss., Kansas State University, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/2097/13524.
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Doctor of PhilosophyDepartment of Geography
Kevin Blake
The American West is a land of great diversity and stark contrast. It is also a landscape marked by rapid change as a result of such forces as globalization, population growth, and heightened interest in natural resources (either for recreation or extraction). This dissertation investigates these changes to the region through a repeat photography analysis. Between 1982 and 1984, Thomas and Geraldine Vale traveled along U.S. Highway 89 from Glacier National Park, Montana to Nogales, Arizona. Their subsequent work, Western Images, Western Landscapes: Travels Along U.S. 89 (University of Arizona Press, 1989), contained fifty-three photographs from this journey, representing a cross section of the West from border to border. Nearly every facet of the region was represented, from the remote prairie landscapes of Montana to the bustling Phoenix downtown, and from the largest open pit mine in the world to seldom visited corners of Yellowstone National Park. Between March 2009 and August 2010, I retraced the steps taken by the Vales and successfully rephotographed all of the locations contained within their book. The observed continuity or change is examined thematically in order to address the landscapes and cultures of the West in greater detail. Specifically, chapters within this dissertation visually and textually describe changes that have occurred along national borders, within Native American reservations, throughout the rural landscapes and national parks of the region, within the many resource extraction industries, and within towns and cities of every size. Significant findings, which are well depicted in the photographic pairings, include heightened national security along the borders, problems of overuse in many parks and protected areas, the transition of traditional small towns into communities increasingly dependent upon tourism for survival, and both beautification and revitalization efforts taking place in the urban cores of Phoenix and Salt Lake City. By painting a vivid picture of recent Western geography, this research provides for greater ability for residents and scholars of the region to understand the forces at work within their communities and surroundings.
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Ward, David Jefford. "People, fire, forest and water in Wungong: the landscape ecology of a West Australian water catchment." Thesis, Curtin University, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/2006.
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Bushfire is, in terms of human lives lost, property destroyed, and damage to natural systems, by far the most urgent environmental problem in Australia. This thesis tries to answer a number of questions about bushfire behaviour, history, effects, and management, in the Wungong Catchment of Western Australia. It does so by an overtly cross-disciplinary approach, involving a mixture of the three main streams of human knowledge, namely the humanities, natural science, and social science.First, I offer a literature review of several hundred books and papers drawn from the three main streams of knowledge mentioned above. The review includes some discussion of ‘bushfire epistemology’, a currently vague and neglected matter.The concept of ‘place’ is important to humans, so I then give a straightforward geographical description of Wungong Catchment, with some mention of the history of bushfire. To describe the vegetation, I use inductive statistics, and a method developed by me from the ideas of Delaunay (1929) and Dirichlet (1850). Given that there are hundreds of plant species within the catchment, I use a landscape approach, and only sketch the main tree species, and two iconic plants, the balga and the djiridji, both of which are important to the original custodians of the catchment, the Nyoongar people. There is discussion of other people’s research into the effect of bushfire on seed banks, and the flowering intervals of some plants of the jarrah forest.To see if Western Australia is anomalous, or fits into the worldwide pattern of humans using fire as a landscape management tool, I then examine some records of bushfire in other lands, including Africa, Madagascar, India, and Europe. The thesis then looks at the history of fire in the jarrah forest of Western Australia, based on observations by early European explorers and settlers from 1826 onward, the views of various foresters, and some opinions of current Nyoongar Elders.Using a mixture of natural science, applied mathematics, and archaeology, I give the results of cleaning the stems of those ancient plants called grasstrees, or balga (Xanthorrhoea spp.). These carry the marks of former bushfires, stretching back to 1750. They confirm historical reports of frequent fire in the jarrah forest, at 2-4 year intervals, and a recent decline in fire frequency. This contradicts the view, held by some, that European arrival increased the frequency of fire.As support for the balga findings, I present a simple mathematical model of self-organization in bushfire mosaics. It shows how lengthy bushfire exclusion can lead to disastrous situations, in which large areas of landscape become flammable and unstable. It shows how frequent, patchy burning can maintain a stable bushfire mosaic, with mild, beneficial fires. In the next chapter, I offer mathematical suggestions on how current unstable mosaics can be restabilized, by careful reintroduction of such burning.In dry, south-western Australia, water supply is an important topic, and a better understanding of the hydrological effects of bushfire may help with both bushfire and water management. I draw upon the natural science of forest hydrology, and the effects of fire in catchments. The evidence comes not only from Australia, but also from the United States, and South Africa.Turning to social science, I introduce Professor Peter Checkland’s ‘Soft Systems Methodology’, and suggest how it could be applied in resolving complicated conflict about bushfire management. I finish in legal style, with a summing up, and a verdict on the use of bushfire as a land management tool in Wungong Catchment, and possibly in other flammable landscapes.
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Brandt, Nicola. "Emerging landscapes : memory, trauma and its afterimage in post-apartheid Namibia and South Africa." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:9dfe7938-670a-40fc-a063-5617c0503fcd.
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Visual records of place remain to a large degree inadequate when attempting to make visible the ephemeral states of consciousness that underlie the damage wrought by brutal regimes, let alone make visible the extraordinary histories and power structures encoded in images and views. This practice-led dissertation examines an emerging critical landscape genre in post-apartheid South Africa and Namibia, and its relationship to specific themes such as identity, belonging, trauma and memory. The landscape genre was traditionally considered inadequate to use in expressions of resistance under apartheid, particularly in the socially conscious and reformist discourse of South African documentary photography. I argue that, as a result of historical and cultural shifts after the demise of apartheid in 1994, a shift in aesthetic and subject matter has occurred, one that has led to a more rigorous and interventionist engagement with the landscape genre. I demonstrate how, after 1994, photographers of the long-established documentary tradition, which was meant to record 'what is there' in a sharp, clear, legible and impartial manner, would continue to draw on devices of the documentary aesthetic, but in a more idiosyncratic way. I show how these post-apartheid, documentary landscapes both disrupt and complicate the conventional expectations involved in converting visual fields into knowledge. I further investigate, through my own experimental documentary work, the ideologically fraught aspects of landscape representation with their links to Calvinist and German Romantic aesthetics. I appropriate and disrupt certain tropes still prevalent in popular landscape depictions. I do this in an effort to reveal the complex and troubled relationship that these traditions share with issues of willed historical amnesia and recognition in contemporary Namibia. Through my practice and the examination of other photographers' and artists' work, this project aims to further a self-reflective and critical approach to the genre of landscape and issues of identity in post-apartheid South Africa and Namibia.
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Carroll, Rachel Art College of Fine Arts UNSW. "What kind of relationship with nature does art provide?" Awarded by:University of New South Wales. Art, 2007. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/43308.
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The relationship with nature through art has been explored as a two fold bond. The first considers a relationship with nature via art and science, where the history and contemporary application of scientific illustration in art is explored; while the second explores past and present connections with nature via art and the landscape, particularly the panoramic tradition. Historically these relationships have predominately been about dominating nature, mans dominion over the land. Science was seen as the only authority, while our relationships with the land in art, positioned the viewer at a commanding distance above and over the land, as seen in the post colonial panoramic tradition. In contrast, -The Coorong Series- explores a lived history with nature rather than the historical role of dominance. -The Coorong Series" explores a relationship of knowledge, understanding, and the experience of nature; through two parts. The first combines art and science in -The Coorong Specimen Series', to explore the facts and knowledge that science has provided about certain plants, birds and marine life from the Coorong. Inspiration has been derived from 19thC scientific illustrations and the lyrical prints of the Coorong by Australian Artist John Olsen. Part two explores the immersive experience of the iconic landscape in ???The Coorong Landscape Series" providing a relationship that seeks to understand the functionality of the location and to celebrate the unique beauty of this diverse region. Inspiration has been gained from the landscapes by l8th and 19th C artists John Constable and Claude Monet, along with landscapes by contemporary artists, John Walker and Mandy Martin. Through aesthetic notions such as scientific illustration, panoramic landscape, immersive scale, the collection of work, an expressionistic use of paint, and labeling of each piece like a museum display. -The Coorong landscape series" provides an exploration of a region that immerses the viewer in an experience of the location. The series portrays a relationship with nature through art that educates the viewer about The Coorong region. Connections are made between the land, birds, plants, fish, and human interaction; which results in an ecological consideration of the Coorong. Ultimately it is the educational experience that art provides allowing the viewer to explore a plethora of relationships within nature, and to explore how these relationships have changed or continue to exist within this era.
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Davis, Jane. "Longing or belonging? : responses to a 'new' land in southern Western Australia 1829-1907." University of Western Australia. History Discipline Group, 2009. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2009.0137.
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While it is now well established that many Europeans were delighted with the landscapes they encountered in colonial Australia, the pioneer narrative that portrays colonists as threatened and alienated by a harsh environment and constantly engaged in battles with the land is still powerful in both scholarly and popular writing. This thesis challenges this dominant narrative and demonstrates that in a remarkably short period of time some colonists developed strong connections with, and even affection for, their 'new' place in Western Australia. Using archival materials for twenty-one colonists who settled in five regions across southern Western Australia from the 1830s to the early 1900s, here this complex process of belonging is unravelled and several key questions are posed: what lenses did the colonists utilise to view the land? How did they use and manage the land? How were issues of class, domesticity and gender roles negotiated in their 'new' environment? What connections did they make with the land? And ultimately, to what extent did they feel a sense of belonging in the Colony? I argue that although utilitarian approaches to the land are evident, this was not the only way colonists viewed the land; for example, they often used the picturesque to express delight and charm. Gender roles and ideas of class were modified as men, as well as women, worked in the home and planted flower gardens, and both men and women carried out tasks that in their households in England and Ireland, would have been done by servants. Thus, the demarcation of activities that were traditionally for men, women and servants became less distinct and amplified their connection to place. Boundaries between the colonists' domestic space and the wider environments also became more permeable as women ventured beyond their houses and gardens to explore and journey through the landscapes. The selected colonists had romantic ideas of nature and wilderness, that in the British middle and upper-middle class were associated with being removed from the land, but in colonial Western Australia many of them were intimately engaged with it. Through their interactions with the land and connections they made with their social networks, most of these colonists developed an attachment for their 'new' place and called it home; they belonged there.
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Chance, Helena M. F. "'The Factory in a Garden' : corporate recreational landscapes in England and the United States, 1880-1939." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:98e6efda-ea51-4bbd-834d-a606fcd5eec7.
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From the 1880s, a new type of designed green space appeared in the industrial landscape in England and the USA - the factory pleasure garden or park. At the same time, industrialists began to enhance their office and factory buildings with landscaping and planting, and some opened allotment gardens for the children of factory workers. The making of gardens and parks around or near office and factory buildings, designed by professionals, was driven by belief in the value of gardens and parks to recruitment and retention of staff, to industrial welfare, and to advertising, corporate identity and public relations. The thesis will show how industrialists appropriated the historical, cultural and metaphorical meanings of gardens in a bid to redefine industry as progressive and responsible and to shift the image of factory labour from unhealthy and exploitative to healthy, caring, respectable and sociable. The thesis will argue that companies employed landscape professionals to contribute to a positive image of industry and industrial development in the suburban or rural landscape, and to harmonise industry and nature. It will show how the factory gardens and parks supported numerous and varied opportunities for outdoor recreation that in some districts would not have been so readily accessible to working people, particularly to women and young people. The thesis will show how companies exploited the social and cultural capital of gardens and recreation space through photography, illustration and film for promotional purposes. It will suggest that although the sporting and other outdoor recreational opportunities at factories were likely to be beneficial to many, the greater value to companies of factory pleasure gardens was in advertising and public relations. The thesis will build on existing research that highlights the valuable contribution of industry to sports and recreation provision in this period. It will also suggest that industry had more influence on gardens and gardening than is currently understood.
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Dahó, Marta 1969. "Del paisaje al territorio. Transiciones entre el giro espacial y el giro geográfico en las prácticas fotográficas (1963-2017)." Doctoral thesis, Universitat de Barcelona, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/667423.
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Las transformaciones que han experimentado las prácticas fotográficas dentro del ámbito artístico en relación con la dialéctica entre paisaje y territorio han sido extraordinariamente ricas y complejas en las últimas cinco décadas. La creciente expansión urbana e industrial, así como la agudización exponencial de los procesos de globalización económica han ido imponiendo formas de experimentar y comprender los territorios que, en rigor, no pueden ser analizadas sin atender a las importantes inflexiones que han tenido lugar en la cultura fotográfica a partir de los años sesenta del siglo pasado. No solo se produce entonces una transmutación que sobreviene con la legitimación museística de la fotografía y su institucionalización, sino que la propia práctica fotográfica atraviesa en ese periodo una transformación radical en relación con los procesos y modalidades de trabajo que desbordarán el marco editorial hasta entonces predominante. Paralelamente, muchos proyectos artísticos de base fotográfica que empiezan a realizarse a partir de esta época, auspiciados por la desmaterialización del arte conceptual, tampoco pueden circunscribirse de forma generalizada a un uso meramente documental del registro fotográfico. Junto al paulatino reconocimiento de nuevas prácticas fotográficas con un carácter marcadamente performático y procesual, a partir de los años setenta y ochenta también aparece la necesidad de replantear la idea de paisaje a través de dinámicas investigativas a largo plazo, muy especialmente enfocadas a la noción de territorio urbano y suburbano. Atendiendo a este contexto, la hipótesis principal que plantea esta investigación consiste en que algunas de las transiciones fundamentales que se han producido en las prácticas fotográficas —y que atañen tanto a la teorización del medio como a su institucionalización— están estrechamente vinculadas a estas revisiones de la idea de paisaje en relación con la noción de territorio. Con el propósito de analizar las nuevas líneas de fuga que diversos proyectos contribuyeron a abrir a partir de los años sesenta, así como su influencia en las décadas siguientes, la perspectiva panorámica de esta investigación permite también establecer una concomitancia entre la transformación de las prácticas fotográficas y el cambio de paradigma que supuso el giro espacial. Asimismo, la tesis aborda la reformulación de los desplazamientos derivados del giro espacial en una inflexión mucho más reciente, definida como giro geográfico.Over the past five decades, the transformations suffered by photographic practice in the art field in relation to the dialectics between landscape and territory have been extraordinarily rich and complex. The growing urban and industrial expansion and the exponential exacerbation of the processes of economic globalisation have been introducing ways of experimenting and understanding lands that, strictly speaking, cannot be analysed without bearing in mind the significant turning points that have been shaping photographic culture since the nineteen sixties. The museum's legitimation of photography and its institutionalisation during these years have led to the transmutation of the medium, and photographic practice itself has undergone radical transformations that transcend the editorial framework that was formerly prevalent. Parallel to this, many photography-based art projects that emerged during these years as a result of the dematerialisation of conceptual art also transcended purely documentary uses of the medium. Along with the gradual recognition of new photographic practices of a markedly performative and process nature, in the seventies and eighties appeared the need to reformulate the idea of landscape through long-term research dynamics focused specifically on the notion of urban and suburban territory. In the light of this context, the main hypothesis posed by this research is that some of the key transformations produced in photographic practices – that refer both to the theorisation and institutionalisation of the medium – are closely tied to these revisions of the idea of landscape in keeping with the notion of territory. In order to analyse the new vanishing points that a number of projects helped open up from the sixties onwards, and their influence over following decades, the panoramic perspective of this research also enables us to establish a concomitance between the transformation of photographic practices and the change of paradigm brought about by the spatial turn. Similarly, the thesis addresses the reformulation of the displacements derived from the spatial turn in a much more recent watershed defined as geographical turn.
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DiBari, Michael Jr. "Advancing the Civil Rights Movement: Race and Geography of Life Magazine's Visual Representation, 1954-1965." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1304690025.
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Fortini, Marcel. "L'esthétique des ruines dans la photographie de guerre : Beyrouth un cas exemplaire." Thesis, Aix-Marseille, 2012. http://www.theses.fr/2012AIXM3083.
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Cette étude s'attache au statut des ruines dans la photographie de guerre et en dresse l'inventaire de leurs aspects esthétiques. Le cas de la ville de Beyrouth, défigurée par les bombardements pendant la guerre civile (1975-1990), est à bien des égards exemplaire puisqu'elle a fait l'objet d'une commande photographique confiée à des photographes prestigieux, en 1991, qui avaient pour mission de conserver la mémoire d'un immense champ de ruines. Cette commande photographique est donc, pour cette raison, au centre de notre recherche. Pour saisir pleinement les enjeux des choix effectués par les photographes au cours de cette commande, il était nécessaire dans un premier temps, d'analyser la mise en place de la constitution d'une esthétique des ruines dans l'histoire de la photographie de guerre de 1853 à 1945, à travers des exemples célèbres sur les champs de bataille. Dans un deuxième temps, il était important de considérer les motivations et les objectifs de chacun des photographes dans le contexte de la commande, en les mettant en résonance avec d'autres expériences photographiques menées à Beyrouth pendant et après le conflit, mais aussi en filiation avec les cas étudiés dans la première partie. La troisième partie de cette thèse constitue un compendium des aspects esthétiques dans le traitement photographique des ruines de guerre à Beyrouth qui permet d'affirmer aujourd'hui que, la ruine de guerre est un genre à part entière en photographieThe present study explores the status of ruins in war photography and draws up the inventory of their aesthetic features. Disfigured by bombing and shelling during the civil war (1975-1990), the city of Beirut is in many respects an examplary case since it was the subject of a photographic commission entrusted to prestigious photographers in 1991, the mission of which was to preserve the memory of an immense field of ruins. For this very reason, this photographic commission is at the core of our research project. Firstly, in order to understand fully what was at stake in the choices made by the photographers within the framework of this commission, we had to analyze how the aesthetics of ruins has been elaborated in the history of war photography from 1853 to 1945, using famous examples from battlefields. Secondly, it was important to consider the motivations and objectives of each of the photographers within the context of the commission. For this purpose we made these elements echo other photographic experiences conducted in Beirut during and after the conflict, then we related them to the cases studied in the first part. The third part of the present thesis forms a compendium of aesthetic aspects in the photographic vision of war ruins in Beirut that makes it possible to assert that war ruins form a fully fledged genre in photography
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Noordhuis-Fairfax, Sarina. "Field | Guide: John Berger and the diagrammatic exploration of place." Phd thesis, Canberra, ACT : The Australian National University, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/154278.
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Positioned between writing and drawing, the diagram is proposed by John Berger as an alternative strategy for articulating encounters with landscape. A diagrammatic approach offers a schematic vocabulary that can compress time and offer a spatial reading of information. Situated within the contemporary field of direct data visualisation, my practice-led research interprets Berger’s ‘Field’ essay as a guide to producing four field | studies within a suburban park in Canberra. My seasonal investigations demonstrate how applying the conventions of the pictorial list, dot-distribution map, routing diagram and colour-wheel reveals subtle ecological and biographical narratives.
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Taylor, C. J. "Collapsible Time: Contesting Reality, Narrative And History In South Australian Liminal Hinterlands." Phd thesis, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/131791.
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My practice-led project explores the indexical lamination of memory, history, narrative and reality afforded by photography imbued with the illusion of spatial dimensionality. This thesis investigates the notion that far from freezing a ‘slice of time’ photography reanimates perception through sensation rendering duration flexible and elastic. Using the liminal landscape of South Australia as time’s stage, I contend that time is ‘collapsible’, constantly unfolding and repeating. In embracing this temporal flow, I submit that photomedia becomes our most compelling connection to time itself, as lived experience. It is this connection that can act as an ethical agent of change for the betterment of the landscape in which we live. The project includes work created in South Australia, the ACT, the United States and the Outer Hebrides and Shetland Islands of Scotland. It includes artefacts photographed in the Adelaide Civic Collection, The South Australian Museum and the National Museum of Australia.
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"Re-Simulating an Artificial View: Contemporary Western American Landscape Photography." Master's thesis, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.18033.
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abstract: Western landscape photography helped to create an imaginative perception of a new nation for Americans. Early nineteenth-century photographers captured a vision of uncharted terrain that metaphorically fulfilled a two-fold illusion: an untouched Eden and a land ready and waiting for white settlement. The sublime and picturesque experiences of the West provided artists a concept that could be capitalized upon by employing various forms of manipulation. In the twentieth-century, the role of landscape photography evolved as did the advancement of the West. Images of wilderness became art and photographers chose to view the western landscape differently. Some focused more sharply and critically on the relationship between the land and the people who lived on it. The influential exhibition in 1975, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape presented work that showed a landscape altered, marked by power lines, houses, and fences. The West as Eden no longer existed. Today, photographers continue to examine, image, and experience western land anew. In this thesis I examine the relationship of contemporary landscape photography and the role of the West, guided by an analysis that traces the history of American ideologies and attitudes toward natural land. The artists I have chosen recognize landscape not as scenery but as the spaces and systems people inhabit, and use manipulative strategies that emphasize an artificial character of the West. Their work elicits antecedent mythologies, pictorial models, and American ideologies that continue to perpetuate internationally.Dissertation/Thesis
M.A. Art History 2013
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Marrison, MM. "Mutable terrains : a photographic exploration of bushland close to home." Thesis, 2022. https://eprints.utas.edu.au/47602/.
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This practice-led photographic project re-explores a fragment of bushland a few steps from my home, to the south of nipaluna/Hobart. The bushland comprises most of the valley, which runs down to the Derwent river. It was part of the range of the muwinina people, the original inhabitants displaced by colonial farmers in the 1800s. Traces of the land practices of both remain. The project has its genesis in a four-decade relationship with this place, which has been fundamental in establishing my connection to land and forming my Tasmanian identity.
The key aim of the research was to re-explore the complexity and variety of the unconstrained natural forms of the bush through the agency of colour and to give a sense of the experience of being within the bush. A further key aim was to explore how a white, locally born artist can find a connection and a sense of belonging to this landscape, and develop an authentic and respectful means of depicting it. Now part of the city’s extensive urban-‐bush fringe—and generally characteristic of the region—land like this tends to be undervalued and unrecognised as a complex and varied environment. It has rarely been the subject of photographic investigation.
This project explores some of the characteristics of the locale, noting evidence of human action on the land and changes within the place. A sense of being immersed in the bush was integral to conveying the experience of being there. The resulting photographs often utilise a construction of pictorial space that is not built on a conventional single-‐point perspective of the vista. On occasion, this led to ambiguities of space and scale. Regular visits facilitated the tracking of temporal and more permanent changes that resulted in the accumulation of multiple viewpoints and the sense of both place and the photographic process as mutable. Text was incorporated in the final printed images to enable a modicum of orientation within the valley and to suggest experiences and stories of place, including the prior custodianship of the muwinina people.
The research contextualises my feelings around land and the natural world and how those attitudes and experiences have shaped the ways in which I photograph land. The daily experience of living with an immeasurable vista, interspersed with walking in semi‐enclosed bush with its more relatable scale, has resulted in a preference for smaller spaces and the elements that constitute these places. Jessica Dubow’s descriptions of how Thomas Baines’ views of the landscapes would have come together articulate the realities of experiencing land and the fact that images can never contain more than fragments—of place, time, or truth.
Previous knowledge established through my familiarity with place and looking again at my photographs of this bush from the 1970s and 1980s underpin the research. This was further informed by Yi-‐Fu Tuan and Edward Casey’s writings on place, space, memory, and re-implacement. The perception of the wildness of the place was measured against Edward Casey’s six traits of wildness, whilst Deborah Bird Rose’s writings provided Indigenous interpretations of wildness and valuable land.
Photography is used in the project as a means of observation. This was based on my acceptance of the camera’s ability to record vast amounts of detail and the premise that the photograph is evidential—even as that belief is increasingly challenged by digital technology. Relevant art photographers who have used the medium on a similar premise include Tasmanians Ricky Maynard, David Stephenson, Christl Berg, and Martin Walch. Each has explored different, more distant parts of the state. As a Tasmanian Aboriginal artist, Maynard’s ancestral connection to country provides a counter to any connection to land that I, as a non-‐Indigenous person, can establish. Geoff Levitus and Ross Gibson provide important context on how non-‐Indigenous artists’ attempts to represent Australian landscapes is a complex and fraught endeavour, but one that is fundamental to a broader contemporary relationship with the land. American photographers Frank Gohkle and Richard Misrach documented aspects of the American West over decades—of particular interest is their inclusion of the temporal and their familiarity with the places they photograph—whilst Korean- American artist Jungjin Lee’s renderings of the Negev Desert conjure ambiguous pictorial spaces that negate single-‐point perspective.
This research contributes to the terrain of contemporary landscape photography through exploring a rarely considered, yet commonplace, Tasmanian landscape. It remarks upon the ordinary materials of landscape—grass, bark, and scrub—in the exploration of a proximate, semi-wild, transitional landscape. The consideration of such a landscape and the methodologies employed offer an alternative view of what comprises a culturally valuable Antipodean landscape and how a non-‐Indigenous relationship with land might be developed.
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Hess, Linda. "The politics of visibility in a mined landscape: the image as interface." Thesis, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10539/19938.
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University of the Witwatersrand
Masters Research Report
History of Art
31 March 2015Landscape representations in Western art have long stood as metaphors for power relations inscribed on the earth, encoding imperial aspirations, national identity, poetic and aesthetic experiences about humankind, nature and the environment. However, contemporary landscape imagery of large-scale industrial, and particularly mining sites, have come to signify, pre-dominantly through the medium of photography, meta-narratives that go beyond the political, economic, and environmental power relations historically endemic to landscape representation. Indeed, I suggest they constitute the formation of a sub-genre within the category of Landscape. Mining activities characterise extensive landscape interventions, often with catastrophic results both above and below ground. Perhaps a mined landscape more than any other, exemplifies not only the interwoven political and economic power relations inscribed upon the land, but also testifies to the underlying pathology of the land. Contemporary landscape studies cut across disciplines and go beyond the apprehension of surface, taking into account the geological as well social histories of land, and thus signal a shift in the aesthetic experience of land, both emotionally and intellectually, and consequently the way in which land is made visible. The visualisation of these land sites through imagery has precipitated an interface of aesthetic experience that simultaneously makes visible the politics symbolically encoded in the landscape itself, and the politics that impact viewership and reception. Nevertheless, accompanying the need to make visible those land sites hugely modified by mineral extraction, from both a historical and current perspective, is an unprecedented urgency that is weighted by a political anxiety over future implications of such land interventions. This anxiety is driven by the spectral nature of mined landscapes. Although monumental in scale, mined landscapes are often ‘not seen’, partly because they exist in restricted zones or are located underground, but often they are rendered invisible through a process of assimilation and naturalisation. A case in point has been the collective presence of mine dumps along Johannesburg’s southern periphery, and which, now in the process of being re-cycled, form the focus of my selected case study, an image by British photographer, Jason Larkin and titled Re-Mining Dump 20 (2012). By seeking to bring sites of mining activity into public consciousness, contemporary representations of mined landscapes also mediate current relations between humankind and the natural environment. As an agent of mediation, I propose that an image of a mined landscape functions as an interface. By situating Larkin’s image within a theoretical framework motivated by Jacques Rancière’s politics of aesthetics and Malcolm Andrews and W.J.T. Mitchell’s landscape theory, I proceed with my investigation in the form of a two-part interrogation: one that places emphasis on theory followed by a practical, creative response to Larkin’s image by way of repeat photography of Dump 20 and its surrounds. To demonstrate the concept of interface, I ‘excavate’ the aesthetic experience of Dump 20 as both sensory apprehension and through Rancière’s lens of emancipated viewership. There is an aesthetic quality of the sublime that appears to pervade visual representations of mined landscapes. Described as industrial sublime, toxic sublime or even apocalyptic sublime, the attention-holding quality these images exercise, through a strategy of aesthetic appeal, contribute to a politics of visibility by subversively implicating the viewer as a member of the human race. Global citizenship overrides national identity in these landscape representations, disrupting a sense of belonging with one of complicit participation in the formation of mined landscapes through reliance on mineral extraction for manufacturing consumer goods. Not only do representations of mined landscapes demand a rethink about aesthetic appreciation of landscape imagery and the endemic political connotations implicated in an understanding of landscape. They actively seek to penetrate surface visibility of land by taking into account the very pathology of land as an on going narrative of human and environmental interaction and life continually in process.
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Ogilvie, Charlene Sarah. "The Aboriginal movement and Australian photography." Phd thesis, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/149690.
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Douglas, Kirsty. "Pictures of time beneath : science, landscape, heritage and the uses of the deep past in Australia, 1830-2003." Phd thesis, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/7498.
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This thesis explores ideas about the deep past in Australia in the context of contemporary notions of geological heritage, cultural property, cultural identity and antiquity. Moving between disciplines, localities, stories and timescales it examines the complexities of changing intellectual agenda. But it does not pretend to present a complete history of the earth sciences in Australia. Rather it brings together an array of related themes, places, and stories, that knit into a narrative about the construction and interpretation of signs of age in Australian landscapes. Taking as its starting point the discovery by European settlers in 1830 of the Wellington Caves megafaunal fossils, which first suggested a long chronology for Australian vertebrate fauna, this work considers 'ordinary time' and 'deep time', geological heritage, the appropriation and celebration of deep time by settler Australians, and the naturalisation of narrative and sequence in
geological writing.
The body of the thesis involves discussion of three landscapes which have been celebrated for the deep pasts revealed in their sediments, landforms and material remains: Hallett Cove and Lake Callabonna in South Australia and the Willandra Lakes in New South Wales. Each of these is regarded as more or less canonical in the respective histories of Australian geology, vertebrate palaeontology and archaeology, but each is also a living historical and geological site where people have lived, interacted with and interpreted the shape of the country for upwards of forty thousand years.In 2010, material in this thesis was reworked and published as Pictures of time beneath: science, heritage and the uses of the deep past (CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood, Victoria): http://www.publish.csiro.au/pid/6342.htm.
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Fiveash, Tina Dale Media Arts College of Fine Arts UNSW. "The enigma of appearances: photography of the third dimension." 2007. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/44259.
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The Enigma of Appearances is an examination into the medium of three-dimensional photography, with particular focus on the technique of stereoscopy. Invented in the mid-Victorian era, stereoscopy was an attempt to simulate natural three-dimensional perception via a combination of optics, neurology, and a pair of dissimilar images. Whilst successful in producing a powerful illusion of spatial depth and tangibility, the illusion produced by stereoscopy is anything but ??natural??, when compared to three-dimensional perception observed with the naked eye. Rather, stereoscopic photography creates a strange and unnatural interpretation of three-dimensional reality, devoid of atmosphere, movement and sound, where figures appear frozen in mid-motion, like waxwork models, or embalmed creatures in a museum. However, it is precisely stereoscopic photography??s unique and enigmatic interpretation of three-dimensional reality, which gives it its strength, separating it from being a mere ??realistic?? recording of the natural world. This thesis examines the unique cultural position that stereoscopy has occupied since its invention in 1838, from its early role as a tool for the study of binocular vision, to its phenomenal popularity as a form of mass entertainment in the second half of the 19th century, to its emergence in contemporary fine art practice in the late 20th and 21stt centuries. Additionally, The Enigma of Appearances gives a detailed analysis of the theory of spatial depth perception; it discusses the dichotomy between naturalia versus artificialia in relation to stereoscopic vision; and finally, traces the development of experimental studio practice and research into stereoscopic photography, undertaken for this MFA between 2005 and 2007. The resulting work, Camera Mortuaria (Italian for ??Mortuary Room??), is a powerful and innovative series of anaglyptic portraits, based upon an experimental stereoscopic technique that enables the production of extreme close-up three-dimensional photography. Applying this technique to the reproduction of the human face in three-dimensional form, Camera Mortuaria presents a series of ??photo sculptures??, which hover between reality and illusion, pushing the boundaries of stills photography to the limit, and beyond.
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Bird, Louise. "The interwar gardens of Elsie Marion Cornish: a comparative and contextual analysis." Thesis, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/2440/70159.
Full textAbstract:
A study on Adelaide landscape designer Elsie Cornish who mostly worked in an English Arts and Crafts garden style that was interpreted for Australian conditions and the needs of her clientele. Influencing her stylistic designs was a philosophical understanding of the interconnection between house and garden and the need for the space to be designed as an integrated whole.Thesis (M.L.Arch.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Design, 2006.
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Bak, Geert. "Negotiating Difference: Steiner Education as an Alternative Tradition within the Australian Education Landscape." Thesis, 2021. https://vuir.vu.edu.au/42217/.
Full textAbstract:
Steiner education, also known as Waldorf education, has represented a form of education “against the grain” in the Australian education landscape since its introduction as a practice in Sydney in 1957. Now with sixty schools or programs nationally, and an accredited Australian Steiner Curriculum Framework, Steiner education has shown that educational roots can be sunk into a different educational soil and can prosper. Contributing to the history of education in Australia, as well as to the contemporary understanding of educational alternatives in the Australian context, this study examines the localised development of Steiner education between the years spanning approximately 1970-2010, predominantly in Victoria. Three periods are covered, comprising a founding school phase (1970s), a second-generation Steiner school phase (1980s) and a publicly funded Steiner “streams” phase (approx. 1990 – 2010). Interviews with forty Steiner educators are drawn on, in addition to documentary sources such as school newsletters and newspaper articles, to examine the creation of six Steiner schools or programs. The thesis by publication comprises five papers – four already published and one under review – and an exegesis. Three of the papers are historical, one explores the ethical and methodological considerations stemming from the insider-outsider positioning of the researcher, and one examines the place of Steiner education in the contemporary education landscape in Australia.
The orientations of each paper draw on different elements of the methodology, including: practice theory, Gee’s D/d discourse analysis, oral history, biographical sociology, and auto-ethnography. The basis of Steiner education in an epistemology of movement, representing a foundational interest in dynamic performative discourse and concepts, in contrast to representational, static ones, represents a further red thread throughout this study. The exegesis places these papers in a broader context of debates on education and Steiner education more broadly, pulling together some of the literature and the methodological orientation as a whole. The focus for this study is firstly on the local circumstances of the creation of the schools and programs being examined, from the perspective primarily of Steiner educators involved, and secondly on the evolving external socio-political and bureaucratic contexts for these initiatives. The significance of this study lies in how it shows that while policies such as ‘choice’ may afford important opportunities for the creation of new Steiner schools and programs, they also constrain the conceptualisation of Steiner education. Secondly, it demonstrates that neoliberal approaches to education has narrowed conceptions of epistemological diversity within schooling, contributing to a glossing over of philosophical alternatives in contemporary scholarship on alternative education. Thirdly, the value of examining alternative education to highlight ideological and philosophical tensions and fault lines is shown, particularly in relation to the challenges of philosophical educational change. And finally, the case is made that contemplative inquiry, as well as philosophical and theoretical developments emphasising dynamic concepts of enactment and performance, such as socio-materialism, present helpful new framings for the notion of applied inner- life activity as recognised within Steiner education.
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Cooper, Jayson. "Co-creating with, and in, a southern landscape." Thesis, 2015. https://vuir.vu.edu.au/30165/.
Full textAbstract:
As an artist and musician, ‘place’ has always been entwined in my creative
work and thinking. This arts-based autoethnography (Manovski, 2014), and
music-based research (Leavy, 2015) draws deep connections between being an
artist, researcher and educator in relation to the conceptual and physical local
landscapes I move through. Situated in local places this research explores the
dynamic overlaps (Yunkaporta, 2009) found across cultures, places, time and
space. In response to this sense of place this thesis presents an intertextual
artistic and scholarly celebration of this Wurundjeri landscape—this southern
place—while critically gazing at myself in relation to land, people, climates, skies,
waterways, and animals as I co-create with, and in ‘the south’ (Connell, 2007b).
A complex polyphonic layering and re-presentation is thus expressed through
the arts-based knowledge and narratives created as part of this artful inquiry. In
this way a multimodal engagement with place, autoethnography and arts-based
narratives is established.
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Owens, Kimberley Ann. "Farmers, fishers and whalemen : the colonisation landscapes of Lord Howe Island, Tasman Sea, Australia." Phd thesis, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/149932.
Full textAbstract:
A small dot of land in the middle of the Tasman Sea, Lord Howe Island presents an interesting and unique opportunity to examine several archaeological and historical questions relating to the colonization of islands, settlement landscapes, and the development of isolated communities. Through a combination of historical research and archaeological investigation, this project seeks to investigate the processes of development and change that were operating in the LHI settlement landscape and to arrive at an understanding of how these processes may or may not have significance for the understanding of other island colonization events, particularly prehistoric ones. Extensive background historic research utilizing various published and unpublished sources; community consultation and gathering of local knowledge; surveys of six historically known sites and excavation of four; and the synthesis of the historic and archaeological data in the creation of settlement landscape maps and identifications of resource use over time were employed as mechanisms of understanding the processes of colonization on a Pacific island, and allowed an assessment of its usefulness as an analogue for similar historic and prehistoric scenarios. The consequential thesis that is presented here outlines these research tasks and results and culminates in the general conclusion that Lord Howe Island is both a useful example and comparative case for other studies while paradoxically being subject to its own unique historic context, and is therefore limited to useful generalities rather than specifics.
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Benjamin, Julie Maree. "Transparencies: New Zealand from 1953 to 1974 through the slide photography of Gladys Cunningham." 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2292/4964.
Full textAbstract:
Transparencies: New Zealand from 1953 to 1974 through the Slide Photography of Gladys Cunningham This thesis focuses on the amateur slide photography of Gladys Cunningham, formerly of Onehunga, Auckland. Viewed collectively, these slides provide a visual autobiography of a New Zealand woman’s life, as well as a larger social narrative. As Gladys’s granddaughter, I argue that Gladys’s 35mm colour transparencies, nostalgic fragments that memorialise a family history, are informed by the social history of European New Zealanders between the early 1950s and early 1970s. Gladys’s slides reflect stabilities and changes for the photographer herself, her family and New Zealand society. While the term “transparency” suggests that the meaning of a slide can be understood by all, in reality further contextual information is necessary to appreciate the family and public histories from which these scenes have been separated. To situate Gladys’s slides, I refer to popular magazines and tourist texts from this period, including The Weekly News, National Geographic and New Zealand Holiday, and to commercial slides, postcards and travel marketing texts. I analyse the near absence of Maori within Gladys’s slides and travel journalism, suggesting that their omissions represent a lack of dialogue between Pakeha and Maori. In New Zealand and overseas, slide photography was the popular medium for recording extraordinary family events during the 1950 and 1960s. Through an analysis of memory, leisure and photography, this study examines how Gladys’s photography documents family and community membership and celebration. I explore how aesthetically pleasing representations of family leisure also contain partly concealed clues to less positive memories and to secrets that were not unique to this family. I discuss the impact of private and public transport on Gladys’s slide photography, noting how car travel facilitated spatial and temporal freedoms, and how slide photography strengthened connections to extended family and distant communities. In contrast, Gladys and Jim’s later dependence on coach transport enhanced their ability to take slides and expanded the “family” gaze of their camera, but limited their photographic opportunities.
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Depairon, Philippe. "«Nous les hibakushas de Tchernobyl» : la pratique photographique de Kazuma Obara en régime numérique." Thesis, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/24295.
Full textAbstract:
La « triple catastrophe » survenue le 11 mars 2011 dans la région du Tōhoku au Japon coïncide avec l’émergence de nouvelles technologies numériques qui ont rendu possible la diffusion en ligne presque immédiate des photographies de l’évènement après leur prise. Un des défis subséquents des artistes professionnels japonais est alors de donner une forme adéquate aux conséquences de ce désastre sans nécessairement contribuer à ce qu’ils perçoivent être un trop plein d’images. Ce mémoire prend la série Exposure (2015 – 2016), une oeuvre réalisée à Tchernobyl par le photographe Obara Kazuma, pour examiner quelques stratégies entreprises par des artistes japonais afin de répondre à ces impératifs. D’emblée, ce mémoire reconstitue les évolutions de la culture visuelle rattachée à la catastrophe de Tchernobyl (1986) jusqu’à l’ouverture officielle du site aux touristes (2011). Les productions photographiques tant des amateurs que des professionnels qui ont visité le lieu sont examinées pour mieux pour comprendre la position que prend Obara dans le champ visuel de Tchernobyl. La théorie du bricolage, telle qu’articulée par Claude Lévi-Strauss et selon laquelle un projet artistique est élaboré à partir des matériaux que possède d’emblée un créateur, jette un éclairage sur le rapport de mutualité établi entre Obara et les parties constitutives d’Exposure. Le second chapitre examine l’aspect fragmentaire de la série et les possibilités de lecture qu’offre ce mode de représentation. La théorie du montage de Walter Benjamin propose que le rapprochement de divers fragments participe à affiner et renouveler l’histoire de Tchernobyl telle qu’elle est actuellement montrée et narrée. Ultimement, le troisième chapitre examine la façon dont Obara rend inaliénable la composante historique de ses images. Exposure est alors analysé à l’angle des théories archéologiques de la spolia, qui démontrent comment Obara rend actuelle la catastrophe de Tchernobyl comme il en reproduit les propriétés et spécificités historiques.The ‘triple disaster’ that occurred on March 11, 2011 in the Tōhoku region of Japan coincides with the emergence of new digital technologies which allowed an almost immediate online dissemination of photographs of the event after they have been taken. For many professional artists, the challenge is then to give an adequate visual shape to the consequences of the disaster without contributing further to an already massive number of images of the catastrophe. This thesis takes a series made in Chernobyl by photographer Kazuma Obara, Exposure (2015 – 2016) to examine some strategies undertaken by various Japanese artists to meet these imperatives. From the outset, this dissertation reconstructs the visual culture linked to the Chernobyl disaster, from its beginning (1986) to the official opening of the site to tourists (2011). The photographic productions of both amateurs and professionals who have visited the place are examined to better understand the position Obara takes in the visual field of Chernobyl. The theory of bricolage developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss, according to which an artistic project is developed by its creators with the materials they already possess, sheds light on the mutual relationship established between Obara and the constituent parts of Exposure. The second chapter examines the fragmentary aspect of the series and the reading possibilities this mode of representation entails. Walter Benjamin's theory of montage suggests that the bringing together of various fragments helps to refine and renew the history of Chernobyl as it is currently shown and narrated. Ultimately, the third chapter examines how Obara makes inalienable the historical component of his images. Exposure is then analyzed from the angle of archaeological theories of spolia, which demonstrate how Obara makes the Chernobyl disaster contemporary anew as much as it reproduces its historical properties and specificities.
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Mercier, Lambert Marie-Philippe. "Reproduire pour déconstruire : le paradoxe de l'engagement dans la série Body techniques de Carey Young." Thèse, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/11968.
Full textAbstract:
La série Body Techniques (2007) a été réalisée par l’artiste britannique Carey Young dans le cadre d’une résidence offerte par la biennale de Sharjah, aux Émirats Arabes Unis. Les huit photographies de format tableau constituant la série montrent l’artiste qui, portant l’uniforme d’une femme d’affaires, réinterprète huit œuvres célèbres associées à la mouvance de l’art conceptuel. Des paysages singuliers, situés aux abords des villes de Sharjah et Dubaï, servent de toile de fond à ces actions et leur confèrent une aura futuriste. La présente analyse tâche de démontrer que la série est habitée par un paradoxe remettant en question le statut d’art engagé que l’artiste revendique pour son œuvre. Ce paradoxe se manifeste à travers trois axes, autour desquels s’articule notre réflexion : les médiations se glissant entre Body Techniques et les œuvres que la série réinterprète, la déconstruction du « médium » du paysage, et le rôle actif occupé par le dispositif photographique. Cet examen attentif de chacune des occurrences du paradoxe permet de révéler Body Techniques comme une incarnation exemplaire de la double contrainte traversant toute œuvre d’art contemporain engagé : celle permettant aux artistes de critiquer le système auquel ils participent, mais les forçant en retour à participer au système qu’ils critiquent.British artist Carey Young’s Body Techniques (2007) series was created in the context of a residency at the Sharjah Biennal, in the United Arab Emirates. The eight large-scale photographs of the series depict the artist, dressed in a business woman’s attire, reenacting eight famous works associated with conceptual art. The backdrops to these actions are unusual and futuristic-looking landscapes from in and around the cities of Dubai and Sharjah. This analysis attempts to demonstrate the paradoxical essence of the series, which calls into question the political status that Young claims for her artwork. The paradox unfolds through three axes, which are used to structure this investigation: the varied mediations between Body Techniques and the artworks it is inspired from, the deconstruction of the landscape as “medium”, and the active role played by the photographic apparatus. This detailed examination of each of the paradox’s occurrences serves to reveal Body Techniques as an exemplary embodiment of the double bind presiding over any work of political contemporary art: that which allows artists to criticize the system they participate in, but also constrains them to participate in the system which they criticize.
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Fournier-Dery, Milly-Alexandra. "La documentation photographique de l'espace limitrophe comme lieu de médiation : Interface (2014), de Taysir Batniji." Thèse, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/18339.
Full textAbstract:
Ce travail de recherche en histoire de l'art a débuté par une enquête sur la série
photographique Interface (2014) de l'artiste palestinien Taysir Batniji. Réalisée au Bahreïn,
l'oeuvre présente une vision topographique et métaphorique des archipels axée sur la
représentation d'infrastructures vernaculaires et de lieux interstitiels. Notre analyse de
l'iconographie des images et de leur mode de production soutient qu'une vision critique subtile
de la situation sociopolitique actuelle du Bahreïn imprègne le travail de Batniji. C'est dans
cette perspective que ce mémoire s'intéresse plus généralement à la représentation
photographique de l'espace limitrophe comme lieu de médiation où peuvent émerger des
réflexions pertinentes sur la situation sociopolitique, économique et environnementale
actuelle. Dans notre analyse de l'oeuvre d'art, la notion de médiation est centrale et intervient
sous plusieurs formes. Nous l'abordons autant du point de vue de l'histoire sociale de l'art, en
considérant les conditions matérielles et contextuelles de l'oeuvre, que d'un point de vue ancré
dans une vision philosophique de l'objet d'art comme dispositif capable d'agir sur nos
perceptions et nos attitudes.This research in art history investigates the photographic series Interface (2014) by Palestinian artist Taysir Batniji. Photographed in Bahrain, the work presents a topographic and metaphorical vision of the archipelagos, focused on the representation of vernacular structures and interstitial sites. Our analysis of the iconographic motifs of the images and their mode of production suggests that Batniji's work presents a subtle critique of Bahrain's contemporary sociopolitical situation. The focus of this thesis is the photographic representation of bordering spaces as places of mediation through which relevant viewpoints on current sociopolitical, economic and environmental questions are set to emerge. The concept of mediation intervenes in many forms and is central to our analysis. We are borrowing from its use in social theories of art history, where material and contextual conditions are considered, as well as in various perspectives rooted in philosophy in which the artistic object functions as a device able to act upon our perceptions and our attitudes.