• Performed Photography,  Stage Photography

    Napoleon Sarony’s living pictures: Photography, performance & American art, 1865-1900

    Pauwels, Erin Kristl, «Napoleon Sarony’s living pictures: Photography, performance & American art, 1865-1900». Ph.D., Indiana University, Ann Arbor, United States 2015 Abstract This dissertation investigates the complex artistic legacy of Napoleon Sarony, a pioneering figure in American photography. Based in Manhattan from 1866 until his death in 1896, Sarony was the most celebrated photographic portraitist of his era, known best for adapting the drama and fantasy of Gilded Age theatre to his construction of public images. Rather than creating straightforward likenesses of his subjects such as Sarah Bernhardt and Oscar Wilde, Sarony used flamboyant pose and costume, elaborate set-pieces and skillful retouching to create what he called “Living Pictures”—expressive portraits…

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  • Stage Photography

    The Role of the Performance Document: The Photographic Paradox and the Ephemeral Event

    Simon, Danni E., «The Role of the Performance Document: The Photographic Paradox and the Ephemeral Event». M.A., Sotheby’s Institute of Art – New York, Ann Arbor, United States 2015 Abstract In contemporary artistic practice, there has been a resurgence of performance- based work, resulting in an unprecedented interest in performance documentation. As performance art proliferates and gains admission into the exhibitions and archives of the traditional visual arts institution, the question of how to institutionalize these ephemeral practices comes to the fore. The documentation of performance, specifically the photographic document, has proven to be pivotal in the collection, preservation, and institutionalization of transient art. Now, more than ever before, the…

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  • Performed Photography

    Performing the image: Representations of the body in the avant -garde

    Hein, Nina, «Performing the image: Representations of the body in the avant -garde». Ph.D., , Ann Arbor, United States 2005 Abstract This dissertation provides an interdisciplinary analysis of body imagery in Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. Building on existing discourse on the body from aesthetic, sociohistorical and philosophical perspectives, the dissertation highlights the work of specific avant-garde artists who actively redefine the body in their work. Specifically, I analyze visual representations of the body in several media—painting, sculpture, photography, theatre performance, and film—as well as imagery of the body in avant-garde manifestos and theoretical and literary texts. I show how the avant-garde represented and promoted certain body images as part of…

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  • Photography on Stage,  Stage Photography

    Staging visibilities: Stanislavsky’s system, photography, and epistemologies of the body, 1870–1938

    Kairschner, Shawn Travis, «Staging visibilities: Stanislavsky’s system, photography, and epistemologies of the body, 1870–1938». Ph.D., , Ann Arbor, United States 2007 Abstract This dissertation locates turn of the century acting techniques within a set of diagnostic discourses that strive to convert the body’s visible surfaces into legible signs of invisible psychic interiority. To facilitate the reading of somatic surfaces, these discourses deployed photographic imaging technologies capable of rendering the surface of the body transparent. I argue that the period’s foremost theater artists, notably Andre Antoine and Konstantin Stanislavsky, applied “photographic” diagnostics to their rehearsal processes and acting systems. These figures developed hermeneutic strategies that enabled actors, during rehearsals, to extrapolate…

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