Text

theses

It is a paradox that postmodern photographic theory—so thoroughly obsessed with death—rarely addresses intimate scenes of explicit death or mortality. Rather, it applies these themes to photographs of living subjects or empty spaces, laying upon each image a blanket of pain, loss, or critical dissatisfaction. Postmodern theorists such as Rosalind Krauss and Geoffrey Batchen root their work in the writings of Roland Barthes, which privilege a photograph’s viewer over its subject or maker. To Barthes’ followers in the 1980s and 1990s, the experiences depicted within the photograph were not as important as our own relationships with it, in the present. The photographers of the Pictures Generation produced groundbreaking imagery that encouraged the viewer to question authority, and even originality itself. Little was said, though, about intimacy, beauty, the actual fact of death, or the author’s individual experience. However, a significant group of American art photographers at the end of the twentieth century began making works directly featuring their own personal experiences with mortality. This dissertation examines the motivations and strategies of four such photographers: Robert Mapplethorpe, JoAnn Verburg, Nan Goldin, and Sally Mann. Additionally, it addresses the social environment that gave rise to these artists’ reflections, such as the AIDS crisis and the aging Baby Boomer population. The photographers discussed here share not only social context, but also values and aesthetic concerns. Included on this list are the embrace of unironic emotional expression, the co-option of beauty as an aesthetic and emotional tool, emphasis on the photograph as a physical object, and a desire to convey to the viewer what it is like to be them—a unique person existing in a particular space and time, feeling specific joys and losses. It is impossible to fully understand the subsequent photographic work of the twenty-first century without considering these artists’ influence alongside that of the Pictures Generation. Doing so allows a deeper, more subtle analysis of contemporary photography’s engagement with time, mortality, intimacy, and beauty, as well as irony, critique, trauma, and appropriation. It enables us to see the true hybrid of influences that have created twenty-first century photography.

ETD_7021

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Mary Kate Scott

doi:10.7282/T3T43W6H

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.