Abstract

The visual part of this project has revolved around ideas that have been in the process of forming themselves for a few years. But if I could assign a topic or a totalizing theme to the project, I would be limiting it in a very particular way. I see Nostalgia as a beginning and in no way something that has come to fruition or to a speci!c resolution. If anything I consider it as a still evolving subject; it is very youthful and fresh for me. The project also rejects a new way of working for me from creating the set to the final production of images. The aim of the piece was to engage in a dialogue with a tradition of image making and reject upon photographs and its role in forming of collective memory. I wanted to examine the role of the space in the formation of one's recollection of the past and to emphasize the impact of such onto present behaviors and understanding of the space and the codes of power that it conceals. My evaluation will directly address historical, psychoanalytical, and biological questions of dominant visuality and sight in the contemporary societies of spectacle. I want to relate to Maurice Blanchot's passage about how "everyday losses its power to reach us; it is no longer what is lived, but what can be seen or what shows itself, spectacle and description, without any active relation whatsoever" or, to go even further, to employ words of Alice Yaeger Kaplan who blames the denigration of memory in this society of spectacle, where visuality and recall is so heavily centers itself around visual sensory experience and memory heavily relies on use of images as a primary basis for the authenticity. I would like to amplify necessity of vrigorous interrogation of the images and concepts that inform and later constitute our memories as individuals and as a collective society as a whole. The body of work presented as photographs under the title of "Nostalgia" that hung on the walls of the SPAS gallery in October-November of 2008 are a manifest to my thought process and my rejections on the impact and danger of image-based recall. I further examine the-knownto-me nature of what appears to be personal recollections and the role of them in the creating the !nal images. As they exist in their !nal form they present no validity and yet violently defend their role in my memory and, perhaps, from now on in the memory of many others.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Photography, Artistic--Themes, motives; Nostalgia in art

Publication Date

8-18-2009

Document Type

Thesis

Department, Program, or Center

School of Photographic Arts and Sciences (CIAS)

Advisor

Engström, Timothy

Advisor/Committee Member

Miokovic, Alex

Comments

Note: imported from RIT’s Digital Media Library running on DSpace to RIT Scholar Works. Physical copy available through RIT's The Wallace Library at: TR655 .R66 2009

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

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