Matching Items (2)
Description
Western landscape photography helped to create an imaginative perception of a new nation for Americans. Early nineteenth-century photographers captured a vision of uncharted terrain that metaphorically fulfilled a two-fold illusion: an untouched Eden and a land ready and waiting for white settlement. The sublime and picturesque experiences of the West provided artists a concept that could be capitalized upon by employing various forms of manipulation. In the twentieth-century, the role of landscape photography evolved as did the advancement of the West. Images of wilderness became art and photographers chose to view the western landscape differently. Some focused more sharply and critically on the relationship between the land and the people who lived on it. The influential exhibition in 1975, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape presented work that showed a landscape altered, marked by power lines, houses, and fences. The West as Eden no longer existed. Today, photographers continue to examine, image, and experience western land anew. In this thesis I examine the relationship of contemporary landscape photography and the role of the West, guided by an analysis that traces the history of American ideologies and attitudes toward natural land. The artists I have chosen recognize landscape not as scenery but as the spaces and systems people inhabit, and use manipulative strategies that emphasize an artificial character of the West. Their work elicits antecedent mythologies, pictorial models, and American ideologies that continue to perpetuate internationally.
ContributorsHerden, Nicole (Author) / Fahlman, Betsy (Thesis advisor) / Serwint, Nancy (Committee member) / Klett, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The purpose of this project is to investigate the political aesthetics of Delilah Montoya's photographic landscape image, Desire Lines, Baboquivari Peak, Arizona (2004), an image drawn from a larger photo-documentary project by Montoya and Orlando Lara titled, Sed: Trail of Thirst (2004). This thesis employs Jacques Rancière's concept of the aesthetic regime to identify how Desire Lines functions as a political work of art, or what Rancière would consider "aesthetic art." This thesis shows that the political qualities of Desire Lines's work contrast with the aesthetic regime of art and systems in the U.S. nation state that have attempted to erase an indigenous presence. Thomás Ybarra-Frausto's and Amalia Mesa-Bains' definitions of Rasquachismo, as well as Gloria Anzalúda's concept of Nepantla, are used to assist in identifying the specific politics of Montoya's work. The first portion of this thesis investigates the image's political aesthetic within the context of the politics of art, and the second portion addresses the image's political qualities within the framework of the politics of the everyday life. This thesis shows that Desire Lines, Baboquivari Peak, Arizona reveals a Chicana/o aesthetic that challenges the dominant paradigm of postmodernism; furthermore, viewing the content of the image through the concept of Nepantla allows for a political reading which highlights the work's capacity to challenge the Eurocentric view of land in the U.S. Southwest. Desire Lines, Baboquivari Peak, Arizona is an indigenously oriented photograph, one which blurs the lines of the politics of art and the everyday and has the power to reconfigure our understanding of the U.S borderland as an indigenous palace of perseverance exemplifying the will to overcome.
ContributorsEsquivel, Mark (Author) / Malagamba, Amelia (Thesis advisor) / Swensen, Thomas (Committee member) / Garcia, Desirée (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014