Abstract

Extending the Instantaneous: Pose, Performance, Duration, and the Construction of the Photographic Image from Muybridge to the Present Day
Adad Hannah, Ph.D.
Concordia University Humanities Programme, 2013
This thesis reports the results of my research from 2005-2012 into the roots of photography—more specifically, the pose, performance, and duration in relation to both still and moving photographic images. Through a series of intertwined case studies, readings, observations, and explorations I show how historical works of art are reactivated through interactions with viewers as well as reinterpretations by artists. I have also made a body of artworks exploring the issues discussed in this thesis, and explore in this written component the connections between my academic research and my artistic practice.
By looking at the roots of photography, the instantaneous photography movement that followed, and the chronophotography of Englishman Eadweard J. Muybridge and the Frenchman Étienne-Jules Marey, I construct a theoretical framework within which I can discuss the uses of photography and the photographic in my own work and by artists such as Walker Evans, Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys, Dan Graham, and Gillian Wearing. I also look at contemporary practices by artists today who use new technologies to explore the history of image capture —from silver salts and zoopraxiscopes to digital cameras and online videos.
Using theorists who investigate the subject using interdisciplinary frameworks, I show overlapping points of agreement towards an understanding of the photographic as a medium-independent state. By bringing thinkers as diverse as Mieke Bal, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Geoffrey Batchen, Rosalind Krauss, and Penelope Curtis into dialogue I am able to delve deeply into the meaning of photography and the pose from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present time.