UC Berkeley

This dissertation argues that through complex photographic self-portraits performed within American geographies contemporary black women artists resurface blackness in geographies, architecture, and landscapes across the history of photography. I explore the photographs of Carrie Mae Weems, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Xaviera Simmons, and Nona Faustine to suggest that interpretations of American landscape photography should always consider blackness. Together, my project and these artists intervene in the history of photography by insisting on the geographic nature of their artwork and the as-yet unexplored black histories embedded in canonical American landscape photography. This thesis is in part a recuperative project, building upon the model established by these artists to puncture, destabilize, and reimagine what lies on the surface in the history of photography. Through strategic pairings of the four artists with celebrated white photographers I outline the capacity for black photography to remake the past, relying on juxtapositions to read the contemporary backwards. Each comparison focuses on shared geographic location to frame and contain specific histories and potentials within these sites. Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louisiana Project (2003) recontextualizes Walker Evans’s Louisiana plantation mansion studies (1935); LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photobook The Notion of Family (2014) introduces black, Rust Belt narratives into Bernd and Hilla Bechers’s United States blast furnaces (1979); Xaviera Simmons’s southwestern landscape photographs (2010s) surface blackness in geological survey projects of the west (1860s); and Nona Faustine’s White Shoes photographs on Wall Street (2013) compel more complex understandings of racial capitalism in Paul Strand’s Wall Street (1915). In these experimental case studies, I seek and resurface blackness in American landscape photographs, whether or not the black body is pictured, through speculative gestures inspired by black feminist writers and in dialogue with performance studies, art history, and the history of photography.