Unfamiliar streets: The photographs of Richard Avedon, Charles Moore, Martha Rosler, and Philip -Lorca Dicorcia
Item
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Title
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Unfamiliar streets: The photographs of Richard Avedon, Charles Moore, Martha Rosler, and Philip -Lorca Dicorcia
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:8ade837abb58:10267
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identifier
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10435
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Creator
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Bussard, Katherine A.,
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Contributor
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Geoffrey Batchen
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Date
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2009
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art history | American | photogaphy | postwar | street | twentieth-century | urban
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Abstract
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This dissertation begins from the premise that the streets of street photography matter. Streets are considered here as both sites and subjects for this genre of photography. Such an analysis demonstrates that streets are specific cultural, political, economic, and social environments, and that street photography often anticipates the affective quality of their reception by viewers.;A key aim of this dissertation is to articulate a much-needed alternative to the dominant discourse on street photography as codified by Henri Cartier-Bresson, canonized by Garry Winogrand, and uncontested in most existing scholarship on the genre. Without spontaneity, speed, instantaneity, stealth, and mobility guiding the discussion, it becomes possible to redirect the terms of that discourse and to acknowledge that the construction and production of many street photographs corresponds---or fails to correspond---to the ways in which the street both frames and determines urban experience.;Case-study chapters on the photographs of Richard Avedon, Charles Moore, Martha Rosler, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia address the historical dynamics that animated and complicated the specific city streets that serve as their sites and subjects. Published during the heyday of postwar consumerism, Avedon's late 1940s photographs for Harper's Bazaar utilize Parisian streets as deliberate locations of material desire and trade on a nostalgic image of that city. Moore's photo essay for Life magazine on the civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham in 1963 capitalizes on widespread awareness of the street as a site of political protest at the outset of a decade that would make the two synonymous. Rosler's removal of human subjects from street photography in her seminal work, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974--75), prompts the viewer's negotiation and reevaluation of urban poverty and homelessness. And diCorcia's projects in Times Square have yielded street photographs that unite the social and architectural space of urban change in America's most iconic public square.;Taken together, the work by these four photographers provides not only a generational span across postwar American street photography; it offers a survey of types of street photography that diversify, expand, and complicate the existing discourse, thereby necessarily changing the practice of the genre's history.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Art History
