Return to sender : photography, art, and the mail, 1845-1945
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation examines the historical relationship between photography and the postal service in the United States, tracing the aesthetic influence of the mail on photographic practice as both forms developed across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since the early decades of photography, practitioners have relied on a burgeoning international postal system in order to send photographs, materials, and information about technological developments across long distances. The official announcement of the daguerreotype photographic process in 1839 occurred just six years before the landmark Postal Act of 1845, in which the United States Congress reduced postage rates to allow the mail to be, for the first time, a viable form of communication for the majority of Americans. Central to the history of photography though rarely discussed within it, this dissertation examines how the mail proved a key agent in the evolution of the photograph from a singular and costly object to a reproducible and disseminable image. Through the work of photographers Southworth & Hawes, William Henry Jackson, Anne Brigman, Alfred Stieglitz, John Gutmann, and Francesca Woodman, "Return to Sender" considers how American photographers have conceptualized transmission and communication as aspects, and even primary goals, of their work. In so doing, this dissertation seeks to reconsider traditional histories of photography predicated on the priorities of modernist formalism, instead framing the history of the photographic medium as one of transmission and exchange.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Pellolio, Natalie Mayme |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Nemerov, Alexander |
| Thesis advisor | Nemerov, Alexander |
| Thesis advisor | Calm, Jonathan |
| Thesis advisor | Greene, Roland, 1957- |
| Thesis advisor | Meyer, Richard, 1966- |
| Degree committee member | Calm, Jonathan |
| Degree committee member | Greene, Roland, 1957- |
| Degree committee member | Meyer, Richard, 1966- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Art and Art History. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Natalie Mayme Pellolio. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Art and Art History. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Natalie Mayme Pellolio
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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