Art & Art History ETDs

Publication Date

5-3-1976

Abstract

The similarities existing between poetry and photography originate in their efforts to express the ineffable nature of things. This begins in both media after 1900 with their denial of heroic subject matter, allegory and traditional concepts of structure. Poems and photographs began to make a turn inward. Their authors began to make inner maps upon which they place symbols and metaphors relating in an enigmatic sense to the exterior world. That is, poets and photographers began an exploration of their interior universe and attempted to find relationships between it and the exterior world. Interior space becomes superimposed upon exterior space. This resulted in the search for new language and image possibilities. In photography the sequencing of images canes into consideration as offering a greater potential than the single image or a series of images, in poetic expression of the unutterable. Just as a poem may be made up of several verbal images centered around the expression of one thought or feeling, so may a photographic sequence permit a more thorough exploration of a thought or feeling contained in a single image. When photographs are considered not for their place in time or as examples of technical progress of the media, it becomes necessary to find another method for analyzing and comparing them. A method must be found that can categorize the images on the basis of their different ineffable natures. This method must exist outside of time, as the ineffable qualities exist more within the eternal moment of time and are independent of the passage of time. For this reason I have adapted the categories for selection of poems that are used by the editors of the poetry anthology, America a Prophecy. Here poetry is broken down into the classifications of: “re-beginnings,” "origins," “rites and namings," "losses,” "histories," "visions," and “music.” This system will offer some guidelines at least in the writing of future photographic histories. These histories would hopefully consider and categorize photographs for what they are expressing and communicating, and this would reflect more adequately what the viewer feels in his experiencing of the photographic object.

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Arts

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

UNM Department of Art and Art History

First Committee Member (Chair)

Thomas Francis Barrow

Second Committee Member

Van Deren Coke

Third Committee Member

Wayne Roderic Lazorik

Fourth Committee Member

Beaumont Newhall

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