UCLA

This dissertation examines the photography-centered practice of American artist Sarah Charlesworth (1947–2013). Charlesworth, like many of her mostly female peers, began appropriating mass media images in the 1970s to address issues of representation, particularly the patriarchal and political power of images in the public realm. She has become overwhelmingly associated with the postmodern “pictures” artists, often referred to as the so-called “Pictures Generation,” a term originating from art historian Douglas Crimp’s landmark 1977 exhibition Pictures at Artists Space, New York, and curator Douglas Eklund’s 2009 exhibition The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. However, Charlesworth’s own appropriations engaged not only in critique, but also in connection and exchange. Her exacting work is not divorced from modernism, paying specific attention to photography’s lineages and legacies—qualities often overshadowed by Charlesworth’s historicization within a Pictures context.Mine is a photo-historical account, focusing on form and materiality, and engaging with photographic, literary, and feminist theory. Important here are Charlesworth’s close connections with Roland Barthes (1915–80), especially with Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980/81), and the two’s similar views on photography, absence, and loss. Also important are literary scholar Jane Gallop’s feminist theories of jouissance, notably her writings on Barthes’s use of the term and its relationship to female agency and creativity. Like Barthes, Charlesworth found pleasure in process and particulars, seeing photography as both problematic and a thing of beauty and relation. This dissertation finds three distinct chronological periods in Charlesworth’s work. Chapter One considers the artist’s early years (1972–80), when she employed found images from newspapers, press photos, and magazines, using subtractive strategies such as excision, omission, masking, and displacement. Chapter Two (1981–89) addresses Charlesworth’s subsequent focus on additive processes: layering, accumulation, amalgamation, and collage/montage. Chapter Three looks at Charlesworth’s shift to analog picture-taking in the 1990s, when she constructed three-dimensional scenes for the camera. Charlesworth’s practice expands on feminist and photographic histories, foregrounding material and process, absence and presence, critique and pleasure. Charlesworth’s “pictures” may indeed be better understood as “photographies,” a term she used to describe the medium’s multiple approaches and functions.