Browsing by Subject "Photography"

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#Explore: Outdoor Retailers, Indigenous Activists, and the Digital Battle for Public Land in the United States
(2020-04) Whitson, Joseph
“#Explore: Outdoor Retailers, Indigenous Activists, and the Digital Battle over Public Land in the United States,” uses digital marketing, activism, and representations of public land to analyze the impacts of the outdoor retail industry on Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous response to and engagement with the industry. Drawing conceptually and methodologically from Indigenous studies, new media studies, and environmental history, this project interrogates the ramifications of commercially driven conservation and public land policy for American Indian treaty rights, resource sovereignty, and cultural preservation. It positions social media as a space of ambiguity, revealing how Indigenous people challenge these representations and respond to these companies. I pay special attention to how Indigenous people unite western and traditional forms of activism and knowledge production to construct alternative narratives, adapting tools historically used against their communities - including corporation structures, social media, and political lobbying - to work for positive change. I argue that through their digital marketing and advocacy, the outdoor retail industry is complicit in settler colonialism, using social media to claim space in ways that erase Indigenous presence and invalidate their legal, cultural, and historical rights to land, while at the same time creating space for dissent.
Fictions of the Other
(2016-06) Baek, Jiewon
This study identifies a dissonance within the humanities between an urge to overcome the centrality of the human and an inability to let go of the human, and frames this dissonance as an ethics and politics of creative media. The literature and visual media examined offer us a way to think about the current value of "human value" in how we fiction the figure of the other. Four contexts are given that exemplify this fictional ethics. First is the context of friendship and community in the philosophies of Blanchot, Levinas, Derrida, and Nancy. At the point where a sense of the common cannot be avowed vis-à-vis the absolute strangeness of the other, friendship is thought as a mode of fictioning the other in excess of the mechanisms of language. In the second context of the biopolitical and immaterial economy, I examine how the literature of François Bon and Leslie Kaplan fictions the surplus-word as an ethical figure that mediates a relation to the other at the disjuncture of the materiality of the other's human face and the biopolitical autonomy of the common devoid of the human. The third context deals with the case of migration in Europe and the question of hospitality, through a study of how the documentary films of Sylvain George allow us to see the figure of the other at the borders of surveillance apparatuses other than in terms of the stranger or foreigner. The fourth context addresses the phenomenon of a global digital face culture through a study of Jean-Paul Marcheschi's paintings, Gérard Rondeau's photographs, and various artists' digital facial projections. In the way that they formalize the visual dimension inherent in the rhetorical trope of prosopopeia and give face to the faceless, these works stretch what we mean by an art that humanizes. Through these case studies, I argue that we in the humanities have been too hasty in superseding the value of the human and that the basis of thinking a humanism of the other lies in the altering of how we fiction our perceptions of the other.
Invisible Cities: creating atmospheres through imagery
(2016-12-21) Hunt, Adam
Within every physical city there are countless invisible cities that exist as perceptions of our environment. Invisible cities are atmospheric qualities that can be experienced by simplifying and removing context around the given subject and focusing on one particular quality. These atmospheres can then be developed and purified in order to breathe life into architecture all around us. Using perceptions, passages in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities begin with objective descriptions of each city, but end with latent realizations of each place. This thesis seeks to use a similar lens to explore a variety of photographers that create architecture through imagery that includes Bernd and Hilla Becher, Andreas Gursky, Irene Kung, and Aitor Ortiz. These photographers use extensive manipulation effects in order to create a common architectural affect, a sense of monumentality de-contextualized with its surroundings. Through my travels abroad I have used photography to document additional atmospheres and have applied the comparison technique used by the Bechers, which highlights what is similar and what is different between adjacent photos. This thesis seeks to challenge the notion that plans and sections are required to create architecture, focusing instead on a series of moments, places, and atmospheres that are akin to photography.
Media as Weaponry: How Civil War Media Shaped Opinion and Morale
(2016-05) Spears, Matthew
This thesis focuses on the role of media during the Civil War and how it shaped the nation’s opinion and morale. It includes how media was used, by whom, and for what purposes. Specifically, I examine the various technologies that were around at the time of the Civil War—written (newspapers), visual (illustrations and photographs), and electric (telegraph). I argue that thanks to the clever, and sometimes manipulative use of media, both North and South leveraged the media to spin information. However, the North was more likely to be effective, and ultimately win the war, thanks in part to their more adept ability to spin information, their greater number of resources, and the government’s willingness to control and censor communications.
Pedagogical praxis surrounding the integration of photography, visual literacy, digital literacy, and educational technology into business education classrooms : A focus group study
(2010-05) Schlosser, Peter Allen
Abstract: This paper reports on an investigation into how Marketing and Business Education Teachers utilize and integrate educational technology into curriculum through the use of photography. The ontology of this visual, technological, and language interface is explored with an eye toward visual literacy, digital literacy, and pedagogical praxis, focusing on the technological change that has occurred in photography. It investigates how the teachers are adapting to the changes, how they are incorporating photography and educational technology into the classroom, and how photography is changing the way they teach.
Po Mo: modernism and the politics of Gothic adaptation.
(2010-06) Curtright, Lauren
This dissertation demonstrates that images of Edgar Allan Poe have shaped his position in the literature and popular imaginary of the United States, that Poe's writings evidence his interest in photography and anticipate cinema, and that Poe's function as a technology has enabled politically diverse, international adaptations of his works and themes. To evaluate the politics of works of "Poe modernism," I interpret their engagement with what Walter Benjamin famously identified as the dual potential of technological reproducibility, or the ways in which photographic imaging has been alternately used to serve reactionary or progressive ends. At the turn of the twentieth century, American journalist Thomas Dimmock and film directors D. W. Griffith and Charles Brabin used technologies of reproducibility to remake Poe from his tarnished image. Narrative accounts of photographic images of Poe published in The Century Magazine and romanticizations of Poe in the films The Avenging Conscience, or 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' and The Raven transform Poe into a model of white, middle-class masculinity. Tracing the etiology of this reconstruction of Poe to the work of William Abbott Pratt, a Gothic Revivalist architect and daguerreotypist, who served as Confederate emissary to England, I historicize and theorize the reproduction of racism within a largely unacknowledged strain of the Southern gothic. Into his fiction, Poe incorporates techniques modeled on the first form of photography. Like other nineteenth-century writers, Poe characterized the daguerreotype as both more "magical" and more "truthful" than previous media. He took advantage of this paradoxical conception of photography to equivocate about the reality of race. Poe's stories suggest that daguerreotypy increased anxiety about the tenability of racial categories in the United States at the same time as they indicate that this arguably protocinematic technology was used to reconfigure a racial hierarchy based on invisible properties. Poe's recognition of the significance of photography to ideology ensured attention to his works by filmmakers committed to social critique. European émigrés Robert Florey and Edgar G. Ulmer adapted Poe's writings to counter both Nazism and American racism. Similarly, reconfigurations of Poe in modern Japan link imaging technologies to constructed hierarchies of nation, race, gender, and sexuality. Specifically, I analyze Poe's influence on Japanese gothic from ero guro nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense)--specifically, Midori Ozaki's fiction--to Ishiro Honda's Gojira to Nagisa Oshima's Max mon amour to the contemporary Ring cycle, adapted from Koji Suzuki's novel series. Finally, I consider the consequences of the modernist fascination with instantaneity as manifested in, among other texts, Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum's multimedia exhibits on the first atomic bombing. The Peace Museum adapts gothic tropes to represent the horrific instantaneity of nuclear attack and to resist the racism that informed the United States' rationalization for deploying atomic bombs on Japan. In sum, this dissertation places Poe within a nexus of creators of textual and visual media all of whom are concerned with technology's effects on human life, perception, and representation.
Re-animating Atmospheres: An exploration in photographic choreography
(2016) Hunt, Adam, R
This research presents a new way of looking at photographs as pre-movement instead of freezing a moving scene. The overall atmosphere created by the videos is a feeling of being disconnected from physical space and in an alternative world. With the help of Gayla Lindt and Christian Korab I was able to effectively challenge the notion of traditional animation and photography, effectively combining the two to create a new means of expression in the world.
sorry mom i'm trying my best, MFA Thesis Paper, 2022
(2022-05) Teachout, Hayden,T
Surface to surface: war, image & the senses in the screenic era
(2013-04) Schrag, Adam
The dissertation investigates the entanglement of war and media technologies from the 1960s to the present in the context of the Vietnam, Persian Gulf, and Iraq Wars. I develop a concept of `the screenic' to address both the phenomenological and ecological aspects of the screen and other junctures of sensory and technological networks of war.
Systems for Embodying Landscape: Dwelling and Movement
(2021) Bauch, Nicholas
[NOTE: THIS PDF DOCUMENT IS DESIGNED AS A TWO-PAGE SPREAD. FOR BEST VIEWING USE ADOBE ACROBAT RATHER THAN A WEB BROWSER.]
Walking Corporate Suburbia: A Photographic and Sonic Record
(2021-04-19) Bauch, Nicholas; nbbauch@protonmail.ch; Bauch, Nicholas
[Written by Nicholas Bauch, 2021] This is a collection of digital photographs, audio recordings, maps, and creative writing. They were all made by artist Nicholas Bauch during multi-day walks that he did in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area between 2018 and 2020. The nodes of the walks are Fortune-500 corporate headquarters based in the Twin Cities (as listed in 2019). Bauch navigated from one headquarter to the next using only a compass while walking. His main camera was a GoPro 4, which he wore for most of the walks attached to either his head or chest. This camera was programmed to take one JPG picture every two seconds for the duration of the walks, which ranged between 4 and 7 miles each. Without the use of other wayfinding technologies, the resultant routes are not always the most direct, creating documentation of an embodied trek among some of the world’s most influential repositories and wranglers of capital, and—more importantly—the urban and suburban space in which these centers are situated. Any large scale economic system—capitalism, in this case—has a built form that emerges to accommodate the (dys)functions of that economy. The photographs produced on these walks seek to expose that built form, implicitly positing that the organization of suburban spaces is intimately tied to the needs, as it were, of the global corporations. These include things like high-speed roads, protected residential areas, and recreational opportunities like water bodies and parks. One can also read in this built form spaces of oppression and poverty, such as unmaintained housing and sidewalks, shuttered storefronts, and many instances of economic liminality, that is, places for people who are involved in the economic system without much choice, but are not its beneficiaries. One of the great consequences of capitalism is its tendency to direct wealth and resources into smaller and smaller numbers of people as time progresses. This can be read in the urban form, and this collection provides visual evidence for this movement towards unequal wealth distribution as it existed in these years. The photos, therefore, record the urban form of a mid-sized, Midwestern, United States metropolis in the late 20-teens. Urbanists, geographers, and planners, among others in the future may benefit in particular from seeing how the myriad details of suburban and urban spaces were conceived, constructed, and inhabited. Bauch’s 70,000-plus scenes document the everyday spaces of life and work, spanning the four seasons of Minnesota’s extremely variable continental climate. The headquarters between which Bauch walks are the main decision, management, finance, and research centers for large-revenue companies that impact the lives of millions of people across the local region, the nation, and the world. While many lives—bodies, even, as in the case of health insurance and food manufacturing—are materially shaped by these entities, most people could not say where they are located within the city and its surrounds. Examples of these companies, along with their annual revenues in 2019, are UnitedHealth Group ($242 billion), 3M ($32 billion), Ecolab ($15 billion), CHS ($32 billion), C.H. Robinson ($15 billion), Cargill (privately held, $115 billion), Best Buy ($43 billion), United Natural Foods Inc ($21 billion), Target ($75 billion), and General Mills ($18 billion). This is not a celebration of corporate life or of the normalization of wealth accumulation, nor does it condone the historically (and currently) racist social systems that make continuously accelerating commercial growth possible at a global scale. On the contrary, it is an attempt to point attention--much as Pop Art might have--toward the realities of economic geography, in an attempt to know them and sow the seeds of rebuilding them in ways that benefit all people. From the artist: My identity as a middle-aged, white, English-speaking, employed, housed, U.S.-passport-holding male positions me to blend-in, as it were, when I walk through areas that do not experience high volumes of foot traffic from “outsiders.” That is, even with a strapped-on camera, I look enough like a local to not arouse visits from the police, or suspicion from other entities that enforce social and economic boundaries. Being ignored is a privilege that only proves the existence of the racist structure in the first place; I suspect that someone pushing a grocery cart, or someone with a camera strapped to a turban, would not move as unencumbered as I have. When I walk, I often find myself trying to imagine the landscape as it might have looked before European contact with the Americas. Without assuming details about the Dakota experience, I think about lives that might have been lived in these places. With each picture, I see what now appear to be banal landscapes as deep containers that have amassed generational layers of meaning. That is, stories about real people who held all the complexities, fears, joys, and wonders of a life fully lived have happened in the places where my feet hit the ground, where motorists fling out cigarette butts and where plows heap oil- and salt-soaked snow.
Where there were no longer walls: globalization, nostalgia, and art in Finland.
(2009-06) Wilson, Sterling Paul
While most of the literature on art and globalization theorizes globalization in terms of its effects on art institutions and markets, I focus on the way in which artists, artworks, and institutions produce the time-space narratives of globalization rather than simply reflect them. I conceptualize globalization as a hegemonic way of articulating the relationships between time, space, and identity in the contemporary moment. As such, it comes into direct conflict with nationalism, which served as the dominant template for creating such narratives during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nostalgia, a longing for a past time or lost place, plays a significant, though largely unnoticed, role in negotiating these shifting discourses of identity. As it is an aestheticization of the relationships between time and space, nostalgia is a powerful cultural tool with which to rework the relationships of the individual to the social, the local to the global, and the past to the present. Each chapter examines a broadly defined site of time-space narrative production, using artworks by artists working in Finland or in nearby Vyborg, Russia or Tallinn, Estonia. I discuss work by the following artists, filmmakers, and photographers: Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Elina Brotherus, Tellervo Kalleinen, Oskar Kochta-Kalleinen, Esko Männikkö, Petri Nuutinen, Anu Pennanen, Minna Rainio, Liisa Roberts, Kari Soinio, and Pekka Turunen. I also address institutional phenomena such as the Helsinki School, the Finnish Fund for Art Exchange, and the international biennial system.
Windows, Mirrors, and the Unrepresentable Earth
(University of Minnesota, Department of Art, 2017) Johnson, Michael T
"Windows, Mirrors, and the Unrepresentable Earth" is Michael Johnson's written thesis submitted to the faculty of the Department of Art in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Fine Arts Degree in Art 2017.

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