| Summary: | Focusing on the work of two contemporary American photographers, Taryn Simon and Trevor
Paglen, this thesis addresses the gap in photographic scholarship between photography as a
documentary form and a conceptual one. Each artist activates questions around visibility,
representation, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics through photographic
practices that shift between image and information, between seductive formalism and revelatory
evidence. At stake in this investigation is a broader consideration of the status of the photograph
and its relationship to exposure and redaction in an era that assumes information, including
visual information, is and should be transparent and freely accessible.
The first chapter introduces a theoretical problem set as the structuring argument of the thesis by
articulating a delicate dialectic between visuality and opacity, one that is operative in the
revelation and concealment of information through visual means. What the photograph delimits
is not contingent, as post-structuralist theory argues, and meanings that press upon the
photograph from outside the frame are not arbitrary: what is external to the photograph must be
considered equal to what is visible within the frame.
The second chapter introduces photographic projects that demand to be addressed as
visualizations of state power, even while the aesthetics of each project simultaneously obscure
the labour and lived experiences upon which they are constructed. Taryn Simon’s series
Contraband examines the space of the American border and the violence done to a highly iii
surveilled but not visible body. Trevor Paglen’s series The Other Night Sky likewise examines
processes of state surveillance and the covert systems of power that exist beyond the visible
realm. In the practices of both it is the self-imposed restrictions, often made visible through the
use of texts, which render the projects legible.
These projects point to an emergent discursive space that does not speak to the binaries of
aesthetics and politics in art, or documentary and conceptual forms of photography. This
complex third space must be recognized in order to address a failure of photographic
representation that is paradoxically pervasive in the contemporary, image-saturated environment. === Arts, Faculty of === Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of === Graduate
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