Negotiating the archive: Photography, authority, and cultural memory, 1861--1876.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the relationships between photography, the concept of authorship, the archive, and their relationship with art history, by exploring two major government archives produced during and immediately after the Civil War. In exploring the photographs produced for the Army Medical Museum and the Wheeler Survey West of the One Hundredth Meridian, I chart the difficult relationship that art history as a discipline must have when dealing with powerful photographs that were only intended for scientific, archival purposes. In the various publications of both archives, the principal author is an institution not an individual. As a result, art history has few of the normal focal points---recognizable author, an obvious aesthetic function, a finite production date, for example---with which to analyze the photographs in front of it. However, the dissertation also explores both the legacy of the Civil War and its effects on both the archive and two individuals' attempts to negotiate their 'authority' in its aftermath. By exploring John William DeForest's <italic>Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty</italic> (1867) and William Bell's stereograph image <italic>The Bath, A Dripping Spring in Kanab Canyon</italic> (1872), I explore how each negotiates their experience of the War. Where DeForest heroicizes himself through his novel, I argue that Bell deliberately submerged himself and his experience within the archive. I also explore how the other Wheeler Survey photographer, Timothy O'Sullivan, may have deliberately explored what it meant to produce an 'archival' image through the landscapes he produced for the survey. In doing all of this, I suggest that 'the archive,' whether that of the Army Medical Museum or art history as a discipline, attempts to eradicate a wide range of experiential traces through a number of conventional methodologies. However, I also argue that photography as a medium is poignantly placed to challenge and question those methodologies.