Browsing by Subject "Visual culture"
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Item The ambiguous frame : Iranian women's death images within the Islamic Republic's visuality(2013-08) Fish, Laura Kathryn; Aghaie, Kamran ScotMany photographs of women published in the Iranian press during the Iran-Iraq War emphasized their roles as supportive and mourning mothers and sisters. By contrast, the often gruesome images that depicted women’s deaths in the war proved more difficult to categorize. The difficulty reflected ambivalence towards attaching the label of shahid, or martyr, to dead women’s images. These photographs, whether gruesomely depicting their bodies or portraits taken prior to death, oscillated between evoking shahadat (martyrdom), consistently applied to men, and depicting their deaths merely as national tragedy. The ambiguous approach to gendered depictions of martyrdom reflected attempts by the Iranian press to negotiate women’s roles during the war in newspaper photographs from the newly-established Islamic Republic. However, in the context of the 2009 Green Movement, Neda Agha-Soltan’s widely viewed death revealed a change in the ambiguity of women’s possible martyr status. In this project, I trace the depictions of women as possible martyrs during the Iran-Iraq War and pose it against the visual experiences during the Green Movement. I argue that while earlier representations reflected tenuousness and ambiguity on the part of Iranian periodicals, such as Ettela’at, Jomhuri-e eslami, and Imposed War, as they sought to grapple with the turmoil of war and a still emergent political system, the Iranian press’s clear denial of female martyrdom during the Green Movement side-by-side with reproductions of Agha-Soltan’s death images reflected a shift in the application of shahid. Although the Iranian press rejected her shahid status, agencies like Fars News attached photographs from Neda’s death video to articles thereby presenting an unclear message about Agha-Soltan’s potential for shahadat. This complicated viewing along with the multitude of examples of her “death” images made her agency in the frame possible, unlike women during the war. Agha-Soltan’s death images presented a possible shift in ownership of shahadat from the state-sponsored press’s hands to that of the people. Thus while the official press had solidified its approach to (not) applying the label of martyr to women, it did so at a moment in which it had lost its monopoly over the declaration and depiction of martyrdom.Item Art and activism 1968-1974 : a season of protest at the University of Virginia(2011-08) Chorey, Kendall Pultz; Bolin, Paul Erik, 1954-; Mayer, Melinda M.This thesis investigates the role of politically-motivated visual culture relative to the social and cultural transformations taking place at the University of Virginia between 1968-1974, culminating in the “May Days” student strike of 1970. This study seeks to recognize the ways through which these visual materials reflected, as well as influenced student response and identity relative to the contemporary social issues of the time, such as the advancement of Civil Rights, the de-acceleration of the Vietnam War and the military draft, and the arrival of co-education at the University of Virginia. This thesis seeks to expand traditional boundaries of the field of art education and its relevance both within, as well as outside of the educational classroom, and demonstrate the significance of visual culture in relation to social conditions and context.Item Bound together : being-with gay and lesbian leather communities and visual cultures, 1966-1984(2012-12) Campbell, Andrew Raymond, 1982-; Reynolds, Ann MorrisBound Together elucidates how gay and lesbian leather communities, in the years between 1966 and 1984, contested and expanded fungible notions of sex, community, and history, mostly through material and visual cultural systems: dress codes such as the hanky code, architectural spaces (bars, bathhouses, private clubs), garments, posters, advertisements, newsletters, films, and performances. In examining visual and material cultures, procedures of archival research, as well as the physical states of key archives associated with historic gay and lesbian leather communities, this dissertation opens out a discussion of a set of visual documents and terms rarely considered within the discipline of art history, or academia at large. Through rigorous rhetorical experimentation Bound Together seeks to propose new ways of writing histories. Long and short chapters are interpolated, telescoping between historical leather communities and key works of contemporary art which reformat 1970s documents and visual sources. Jean Luc-Nancy’s conception of “being-with,” a state of coterminous existence that lies at the foundation of being and subjecthood, provides an ideal framework for coming to terms with the challenges of writing leather histories. Nancy’s notion is one that privileges mutual and relational difference. The structure of Bound Together works similarly, building a set of differential modes of viewing, analyzing and writing. In this way I wish to, in the words of Tilottama Rajan, use “history as the condition for an internal distanciation and for self-reflection on what we do,” and to furthermore present alternatives to a discipline’s often “routinized, even commodified […] repeatable techniques.”Item Br(others) only : Rashid Johnson, class, and the fraternal orders of Afrofuturism(2012-08) Richardson, Jared C. 1988-; Smith, Cherise, 1969-Br(others) Only conceptualizes the wall sculptures of Rashid Johnson as free-standing “altars” that play with different and sometimes divergent brands of black masculinity and classed homosociality. Primarily, I analyze three of Johnson’s sculptures from the late 2000s: I Who Have Nothing (2008); I’m Still in Love with You (2008); and Souls of Black Folk (2010). I argue that, by invoking the history of black renaissance men, gentlemen scholars, and entertainers, Johnson’s work plays with various kinds of black masculinity and homosociality that simultaneously straddle the past and future. By doing so, his art not only enacts a racialized temporality, but it also chips away at monolithic notions of black masculinity by fabricating contradictory amalgams of race, class, and gender. For my analysis of Johnson’s artworks, I utilize Cassandra Jackson’s Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body (2010) as the chief framework for conceptualizing the waxy coats of Johnson’s sculptures as wounded bodies in an effort to “flesh out” the vulnerability of black men. Theorizing the putrescent surfaces of Johnson’s sculptures as violable bodies allows me to consider the ruptures between seemingly impenetrable black masculinity and the always-present vulnerability of the black male body to violence.Item Constructing Afro-Cuban womanhood : race, gender, and citizenship in Republican-era Cuba, 1902-1958(2011-08) Brunson, Takkara Keosha; Guridy, Frank Andre; Garfield, Seth; Gill, Tiffany; Arroyo, Jossianna; Smith, CheriseThis dissertation explores continuities and transformations in the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood in Cuba between 1902 and 1958. A dynamic and evolving process, the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood encompassed the formal and informal practices that multiple individuals—from lawmakers and professionals to intellectuals and activists to workers and their families—established and challenged through public debates and personal interactions in order to negotiate evolving systems of power. The dissertation argues that Afro-Cuban women were integral to the formation of a modern Cuban identity. Studies of pre-revolutionary Cuba dichotomize race and gender in their analyses of citizenship and national identity formation. As such, they devote insufficient attention to the role of Afro-Cuban women in engendering social transformations. The dissertation’s chapters—on patriarchal discourses of racial progress, photographic representations, la mujer negra (the black woman), and feminist, communist, and labor movements—probe how patriarchy and assumptions of black racial inferiority simultaneously informed discourses of citizenship within a society that sought to project itself as a white masculine nation. Additionally, the dissertation examines how Afro-Cuban women’s writings and social activism shaped legal reforms, perceptions of cubanidad (Cuban identity), and Afro-Cuban community formation. The study utilizes a variety of sources: organizational records, letters from women to politicians, photographic representations, periodicals, literature, and labor and education statistics. Engaging the fields of Latin American history, African diaspora studies, gender studies, and visual culture studies, the dissertation maintains that an intersectional analysis of race, gender, and nation is integral to developing a nuanced understanding of the pre-revolutionary era.Item Emergency cinema in Syria : (re)envisioning documentary-as-witness(2014-05) McLelland, Alex Key; Atwood, Blake Robert, 1983-By contrasting the uses of image-as-evidence and documentary-as-witness, this report challenges some of the maxims of documentary film studies and exposes the ways in which different forms of audiovisual media construct distant conflict. More specifically, the report analyzes a purposive case selection of videos/films related to the Syrian uprising: the first set of visual data includes a montage of 13 YouTube videos claiming to show the aftereffects of the 21 August 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria; the visual analysis in section two centers upon a selection of 15 short documentary films produced by the Syrian Abounaddara Collective. Theoretically, the study advances the value of witnessing in the re-envisioning of documentary film. My research demonstrates the relative weakness of both legalistic and journalistic approaches to depicting war that treat visual material primarily as recorded fact or evidence. In its place, the report advances a new form of documentary with a higher degree of interpretive acumen based on the "emergency cinema" model developed in Syria -- what I term "documentary-as-witness."Item The influence of writing-integrated art curriculum on elementary students' meaning making about art and visual/material culture(2010-08) Mok, Jung Hyun; Bolin, Paul Erik, 1954-; Mayer, MelindaThis research study presents a theoretical and practical basis for an art curriculum that incorporates writings into the elementary art class in order to enhance students’ meaning making through art. This research is comprised of two related studies. The first study is a case study documenting an elementary school art curriculum unit, which was implemented in an art class at the Austin Korean School (AKS). The second study is an action research project with an individual student from the AKS art class. The goals of these two related studies have been to help elementary students to interpret meanings of images and to construct meanings through both making and viewing images.Item Lothar Osterburg’s Imagining New York: a melancholic picturing of the past(2014-05) Balboni, Francesca Jean; Reynolds, Ann MorrisHow do we engage with old photographs or with images that appear to be “old?” Moreover, how do we relate to the past through such images? These are questions I explore through a series of photographs created between 2007 and 2013 by master printmaker, Lothar Osterburg (German, b. 1961). For Imagining New York, Osterburg worked purely from memory, building models of the city from found and everyday materials and composing them through the frame of a fixed camera lens. As his look through the lens suggests, Osterburg’s New York stems, perhaps primarily, from memories of images. His final images, printed as photogravures, may create a similarly memory-fueled experience for the viewer. These images may look and feel quite familiar, but they resist easy identification; the strange artificiality and generic nature of the model may bring to mind any number of associations—real and fictional—spanning the turn of the twentieth century, each slipping into the next. Thinking Imagining New York through Sigmund Freud’s potentially productive melancholia, and Walter Benjamin’s melancholic “historical materialism,” I suggest that the ambivalence of Osterburg’s images—their particular fixation on the past—invites a mode of viewing that produces a certain distance, a critical remove not only from habitual viewing practices, but also from the viewer’s own relation to the past. But how is this melancholic movement productive today? Osterburg’s images may point to a collective experience in seemingly personal “historical processes” of reflection; emphasizing the status of the past in the imagination as image, it may become something that—together—we actively access and construct to inform the present. And through the critical distance they prompt, these images suggest “work” that is productive in acknowledging, specifically, the misrecognition of the social. During this process of prolonged disjuncture of temporality and space, the viewer quite literally “sees” these images differently. Or rather she may “see” herself seeing them, to become aware of her active role as viewer, as an active presence in the present. And in turn, it may be that the past—a kind of cultural experience—becomes an active, present social formation.Item Picturing the peasant : nation and modernity in 20th century Bulgaria(2013-05) Hillhouse, Emily Anne; Neuburger, Mary, 1966-This dissertation examines representations of the Bulgarian peasant in order to explore how nationalist, agrarian and ultimately communist governments attempted to negotiate the meaning of "modernity" in predominantly rural Bulgaria. This work is not intended as a survey of displays of folk culture in the 20th century, but instead focuses each chapter on an important person, movement or organization which best seems to articulate Bulgaria's evolving sense of itself and its place on the edge of Europe. Beginning with a background chapter on the 1878-1917 period, I trace the foundation and development of ethnographic display, representations of peasants in the interwar educational press, campaigns to improve village hygiene and culture, alpine tourism, and the ever-changing image of peasants in propaganda from the years of agrarian rule in the 1920s through the early decades of communism. My dissertation explores the contested meanings of peasant images in Bulgaria's changing political and social milieu. Bulgaria's acceptance into first Europe and later the Soviet sphere of influence was for many nation-builders predicated upon her ability to attain European and later Soviet-style modernity. However, these modernities were based upon ideas of industrialization and urbanization. In the middle of the 20th century, however, Bulgaria's economy was still overwhelmingly agricultural. This represented a problem for Bulgaria's nation builders. Confronted with these seeming contradictions, different regimes attempted to incorporate the rural population into their visions of a modern Bulgaria. The changing nature of this imagined Bulgaria can be best elucidated through images of the Bulgarian peasantry. At one moment incorporated and at another excluded, modern and backward, embraced and reviled, the imagined peasantry reveals the anxieties and aspirations of Bulgarian state builders in the 20th century.Item Popular Television and Visual Culture: Intentions and Perceptions of Aliens in America(2010-10-12) Sourdot, Ludovic A.This study examined the intentions of a group of individuals who created the sitcom Aliens in America broadcast on the CW Network in 2007-2008 and the ways in which three separate groups (bloggers, TV critics and local television viewers) perceived the show. In doing so I attempted to uncover the pedagogical implications of these intentions and perceptions for visual culture studies. I used a qualitative approach to conduct this study. I gathered interviews the creators of the show gave to media outlets in 2007 and 2008. I also gathered data from three other distinct groups for this study. First, I conducted focus group interviews with 13 individuals who watched and discussed their perceptions of Aliens in America. Second, I surveyed the perceptions of bloggers through a narrative analysis of postings published on the CW network website in 2007-2008. Thirdly, I sampled reviews of the show by TV critics to learn about their perceptions of the show. This study uncovered three key findings. First, the existence of a gap or disconnect between the ways in which the show was intended by its creators and how it was perceived by selected audiences. The second major finding was the unexpected level of engagement with the show exhibited by bloggers and focus group participants and their deep connection with some of the characters. The third finding involved the use of audio cues in some episodes of the series and its possible influence on viewers to react in a certain way to specific situations. These findings have specific implications for visual culture studies. First, the show presents an immense potential for use with seasoned educators during workshops. Second, these findings indicate that the use of audio cues in TV shows is problematic for younger audiences and requires more media literacy to take place in the art education classroom. Third, teacher education programs could use the show to train pre-service teachers and help them relate to the type of television programming their students are engaging with on a daily basis.