Embodying gender: Narrative and spectacle in the photography of Alfred Stieglitz, Imogen Cunningham, Minor White, and Robert Mapplethorpe.
Item
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Title
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Embodying gender: Narrative and spectacle in the photography of Alfred Stieglitz, Imogen Cunningham, Minor White, and Robert Mapplethorpe.
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Identifier
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AAI3063819
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identifier
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3063819
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Creator
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Cornell, Daniell.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Carol M. Armstrong
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Date
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2002
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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 | Cinema | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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This study of four twentieth-century photographers is based in debates over gendered representations that have had their initial articulation in film theory. Specifically, it examines the tradition of cinematic spectacle and its address to the spectator's self-conscious viewing experience as a way to critique narrative models of photographic interpretation drawn from psychoanalysis and the visual logic of the gaze.;The first chapter explores Alfred Stieglitz's shift from a Pictorialist to an avant-garde representational mode consistent with linguistic theories of metaphor and metonymy. It focuses on his Equivalents, photographs of clouds and sky, and then considers how they provide the visual language for his Portrait series of Georgia O'Keeffe.;The second chapter traces Imogen Cunningham's progression from a Pictorialist to an avant-garde mode of photography, comparing the nude photographs of her husband Roi Partridge with the more abstract visual syntax of her male nudes from the nineteen twenties, which undercut and destabilize the commonplace gendering and sexing of bodies. A similar radical vocabulary is shown operating in her botanical studies.;The third chapter considers how Minor White continued the well-established vocabulary of abstraction in pure photography by extending Stieglitz's notion of the equivalent, transforming its goals to explore his ambivalence toward his closeted gay desires through his sequenced images of ocean beaches and male nudes.;The fourth chapter considers how Robert Mapplethorpe s photographs implicate viewers in the gay erotics that inflect his mate nude studies and botanicals. Suspending viewers between narrative and spectacle address, his photographs resist the traditional art historical division between modernism and postmodernism by their commitment to the self-reflexivity of abstract reference, the ambiguity of gendered associations, and the necessity of contingent relations.;The conclusion returns to the period of the nineteen twenties in which the study begins, using the understanding of spectacle explored in photography as a strategy to resist the traditional hegemonic narratives of classical Hollywood cinema. Specifically, it investigates the conditions of queer spectatorship and their relation to spectacle attraction in two of Douglas Fairbanks's most popular films, The Thief of Bagdad and The Black Pirate.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
