Losing, looking for and finding each other again. The visual diary of Anna Di Prospero between reality and immaginary

A mirror allows us to see the impossible, both in the immediacy of the everyday and the conceptual discourse surrounding art and experience. The simplest expression of this impossibility is perhaps that with a mirror we can see ourselves and what is behind us, beyond our direct looking, all at once. More profoundly, the mirror is at the conceptual centre of the history of Western art and the paradoxes of representation. In the medium and discipline of photography, it has been particularly active in both its prosaic and symbolic roles. In eighteenth-century Britain, a particular type of compact mirror was used by artists and tourists to view and imaginatively shape the landscape into picturesque talking points: the Claude glass. This was such a popular activity that guidebooks advised of sites where the best views of outstanding landscapes were to be seen with the aid of the glass. While the Claude glass is routinely cited in tracing the prehistory of photography and widely referred to in art history, landscape theory, colonial studies, literature studies, and more, it has had limited serious consideration and is generally understood as an obsolete optical tool. This research argues that there is more to be learnt from the Claude glass. The way of seeing and shaping landscape enabled by the device has numerous contemporary parallels, including its instant picture-making ability and the use of optical technology to manipulate the appearance of landscape to conform with the fashions of the day. This project argues that a re-evaluation and expanded understanding of the Claude glass is useful in comprehending current trends in photography and its technology that allows users to filter their view and share their algorithmically coded pictures. These trends are also better understood through the embodied model of the Claude glass rather than the disembodied camera obscura. To this end, the creative output of my doctorial research investigates the photographic object through themes of cultural and natural tourism, and the blending of the fictive and the real in landscape depiction. These works reference the Claude glass physically and conceptually in order to interrogate the way of seeing offered by this historical optical instrument and how that can inform contemporary landscape photography. Imagery was captured on location locally and during travel to historically linked locations in Tasmania and Scotland, then manipulated and constructed in the studio. A variety of photographic objects have been made using different production techniques and displayed through the course of the research. The works are not meant to merely recreate the object itself but to introduce new questions around the capabilities and limitations of contemporary imaging technology by demonstrating how simple artistic interventions such as shapes, collage and reflection shift our engagement with landscape. These relationships are reanimated and made more visible by recourse to the Claude glass, which has allowed me to consider the differences between veracity and truth in photographic production and how certain imagined realities around landscape representation become true only through photographic production.

Charles C. Zoller (1856-1934) was prolific photographer and native of Rochester, New York. His archive is held at George Eastman International Museum of Photography and Film and consist of over 8,000 photographic objects, just under 4,000 of which are autochrome plates. This thesis focuses on the approximately 317 Zoller autoochromes of Florida that make up a small fraction of the fonds This thesis furthermore considers the visual representatin of Florida in color in the early twentieth century and compares tropes in this imagery to Zoller's representation of the Sunshine State. Traveling and photographing extensively in North America and Europe, Zoller produced both color images with Lunière Autochrome plates and black-and-white images with various photographic products. Upon return to Upstate New york, Zoller gave lectures on a variety of topics, illustrating these lectures with projected autochromes and lantern slides. Since there are few know autochromes of Florida, Zoller's series are some of the earliest examples of color photographs of the state. While Zoller's images are often predictable representations of Florida, they nevertheless provide a window into how Florida was presented in the early part of the last century. This thesis compares Zoller's autochromes to other popular images of Florida in that time.

Charles C. Zoller (1856-1934) was prolific photographer and native of Rochester, New York. His archive is held at George Eastman International Museum of Photography and Film and consist of over 8,000 photographic objects, just under 4,000 of which are autochrome plates. This thesis focuses on the approximately 317 Zoller autoochromes of Florida that make up a small fraction of the fonds This thesis furthermore considers the visual representatin of Florida in color in the early twentieth century and compares tropes in this imagery to Zoller's representation of the Sunshine State. Traveling and photographing extensively in North America and Europe, Zoller produced both color images with Lunière Autochrome plates and black-and-white images with various photographic products. Upon return to Upstate New york, Zoller gave lectures on a variety of topics, illustrating these lectures with projected autochromes and lantern slides. Since there are few know autochromes of Florida, Zoller's series are some of the earliest examples of color photographs of the state. While Zoller's images are often predictable representations of Florida, they nevertheless provide a window into how Florida was presented in the early part of the last century. This thesis compares Zoller's autochromes to other popular images of Florida in that time.

The Way She Looks: A History of Female Gazes in African Portraiture—Photographs from the Walther Collection

Repeat tourists and familiar place formation: Conversion, inheritance and discovery

In this article, I wish to demonstrate how the theatre translator, when tailoring his/her translation to suit a particular theatre audience, resorts to creative strategies so as to establish dialogues between the exporting and importing cultures s/he is dealing with. Based on both my own translation of By the Bog of Cats… (1998), written by contemporary Irish playwright Marina Carr, and fieldwork carried out with a group of acting students in Florianopolis, Brazil (June 2010), this article shows how the Irish play, when translated into Brazilian Portuguese, creates layers of intertextuality with Brazilian–Azorean folklore and Brazilian theatre tradition, most particularly with Nelson Rodrigues’s modern play Vestido de noiva [The Wedding Dress]. The local language of southern Brazil set in the mystically unsettling space of a bog invited the actors, the director, and the audience members to embark on a hybrid voyage to both familiar and foreign places.

Mandel'shtam's poetry reflects a feeling of alienation from his surroundings both as a poet, whose calling endows him with unique perceptiveness, and as a person crushed by the Soviet regime. This alienation is concretized in different ways: familiar places and scenes are estranged and distanced, foreign names and places are mingled with native loci, and direct references are made to an encounter with foreign elements.This paper offers readings of two poems through their versions in translation. Since translation attempts to familiarize the foreign, much can be gathered from these versions about the nature of the foreign, or alien, elements in each poem. The first of them, 'He …' ('Don't tempt foreign languages …'), presents ambivalent emotions aroused by foreign speech. In the second poem '' ('I'm still far from patriarch …'), the speaker strolls through Moscow, where he feels a stranger and a native inhabitant at once. The translations indicate to what extent each text is felt to be foreign through the degree by which they mitigate and familiarize it. They also shed light on the poems in specific places. Finally, the popularity of a given poem in translation often indicates its universal appeal. Thus, the present study suggests the comparative examination of translations as a method of reading and interpreting poetry.

The use of deep-learning algorithms in the production of photographs has challenged a key distinction within media images: that between the photograph and the frame. Theory has often emphasized the non-coincidence of these two modes of the photographic, one incomplete and lacking its own visibility, the other autonomous, unique, and finite. But today, the intervention of algorithms at the stage of image capture weakens this distinction. Even the single photographic snapshot becomes a “vertical” concentration of several images, while an apparently fixed photograph can conceal a “horizontal” series of images that also allow the picture to be viewed as a clip. In the face of these “dense” snapshots, which no longer correspond to human perception and imply a very different dialectic between trace and visualization, singular and plural, snapshot and series, does it still make sense to juxtapose the photographic object and the photogrammatic material used within numerous types of imaging? Or should the photographic be redefined as a genetically serial process?

The first virtual reality (VR) systems have hit the shelves, and 2017 may become the year where VR finally enters the homes of consumers in a big way. By allowing users to perceive and interact in a natural manner, VR offers the promise of realistic experiences of familiar, foreign, and fantastic virtual places and events. However, should we always opt for the highest degree of fidelity when striving to provide users with realistic experiences? In this position paper, we argue that when certain components of fidelity are limited, as they will be in relation to consumer VR, then maximizing the fidelity of other components may be detrimental to the perceived realism of the user. We present three cases supporting this hypothesis, and discuss the potential implications for researchers and developers relying on commercially available VR systems.

This thesis is based on a photographic collection of Indian painted photographs from the South Asian Photographic collection at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). There are fifty-four photographic objects created by various makers and photographers with dates ranging from the 1880's to the 1990's. For the most part the objects are examples of studio portraiture. Most of them are photographic images with applied colour, however, there are some examples of paintings in this group that were executed in the tradition of photographic studio portraiture, but have no evidence of a photosensitive material underneath. The paintings, as well as the painted photographs, employ different media, such as watercolour, gouache and oil paints. The objects I investigated and catalogued fall under three categories: prints made by contact printing, by enlargement, and finally paintings produced using a photograph as a model. Tinting of photographs was a well-known Western tradition in the nineteenth century, while the process that Indian artists developed was a synthesis of their long practiced tradition of miniature painting and the newly developed technology of photography. Finally this thesis unveils the means of production of Indian painted photographs, and tries to find the reason for Indian artists employing opaque medium in their colourings.

This thesis is based on a photographic collection of Indian painted photographs from the South Asian Photographic collection at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). There are fifty-four photographic objects created by various makers and photographers with dates ranging from the 1880's to the 1990's. For the most part the objects are examples of studio portraiture. Most of them are photographic images with applied colour, however, there are some examples of paintings in this group that were executed in the tradition of photographic studio portraiture, but have no evidence of a photosensitive material underneath. The paintings, as well as the painted photographs, employ different media, such as watercolour, gouache and oil paints. The objects I investigated and catalogued fall under three categories: prints made by contact printing, by enlargement, and finally paintings produced using a photograph as a model. Tinting of photographs was a well-known Western tradition in the nineteenth century, while the process that Indian artists developed was a synthesis of their long practiced tradition of miniature painting and the newly developed technology of photography. Finally this thesis unveils the means of production of Indian painted photographs, and tries to find the reason for Indian artists employing opaque medium in their colourings.

Memorials and the Mine Disaster in Monongah, West Virginia: From Trauma to an Italian Global Memoryscape