Since its invention, the photographic medium has promised to create a pictorial record to "fix" moments of history. Archives, atlases, and albums have been produced to organize these records. Archives are meant to house history; atlases to instruct; personal albums to offer stories. Yet postwar artists Christian Boltanski, Gerhard Richter, and Dinh Q. Lê produce artworks that both clarify and obfuscate such constructs. In their works, photographs are not stable markers of a past time, but points within malleable constellations of historical meaning.
This dissertation reveals how these three artists use photography to complicate notions of history, memory, and the organizational structures used to produce photographic meaning. Based on artist interviews, visits to photographed sites, examination of archival material, and analysis of the artists' photographic constructions, I argue that in their relation to photographic history, these artists demonstrate an aesthetic that is born of doubt. Unlike textbooks that make use of photographs as if they could stabilize the historical record, works produced by these artists insist on a version of history whose chief attributes are difficulty of access and mutability of meaning.
Each artist has an experience of wartime trauma that has sharpened his questioning of an image-based history. A young Gerhard Richter (b. Germany, 1932) witnessed the personal and societal toll of World War II in East Germany. Christian Boltanski (b. France, 1944) grew up in the aftermath of the Holocaust in a French Jewish-Catholic family. Dinh Q. Lê (b. Vietnam, 1968) escaped war-torn Vietnam and the terrors of the Khmer Rouge and fled to the United States.
In five chapters, the terms archive, atlas, and album are analyzed in the work of these artists as marking several intersections--fine art with the vernacular, the institutional document with the personal memento, and the historical function of the photograph with its failure to fix meaning. The dissertation concludes that these artists operate against a normative history, forcing viewers actively to tease out threads of the interpretive process, and producing a nuanced understanding of photographs' unstable role in the construction of history.
My Research