Date of Award

Spring 5-30-2016

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

Photography

First Advisor

Eva Sutton

Second Advisor

Anne West

Third Advisor

Douglas Nickel

Abstract

Objects, places and events that occur in separate times and places can coexist psychologically. My work supposes that this coexistence can be reconciled with photographs, which, although normally fixed to particular times, locationsand stories, are nevertheless able to travel, in boxes, or as mind images on overlapping currents.

I return to places of imaginative influence in my life: to my grandmother's house in the Russian countryside where I spent my summers as a child, and to my parents' home in Germany. Through this journey of return, I am transported in time, as if opening a time capsule. Here I discover layers of image fragments captured in stories, old objects, images in albums and magazines. Using still life techniques, I construct pictures that include objects found on location with photographs that I bring with me. To represent the non-linear experience of time and place to which these setups refer, I arrange them with multiple perspectives within a single image.

This work considers the fictional and non­ fictional, fused by the perspectival image that renders all elements equally onto a picture plane. It is a journey into the past as a metaphorical stepping back, in search of an Archimedean point from which to comprehend images through photographs.

Included in

Photography Commons

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