@mastersthesis {8668,
	title = {Five American Photographers in the 1970{\textquoteright}s: Conceptual Issues},
	year = {2000},
	school = {CUNY},
	abstract = {The place and practice of photography shifted during the decade of the 1970s. The rupture between modernism and post-modernism, in theory and in production, provided a field in which photography worked flexibly, and photographs were produced that centered specifically on conceptual and theoretical problems. Photographers freely used techniques of appropriation, manipulation, and studio set-ups to explore issues that concerned the culture of late capitalism. The photograph also began to appear in the rainbow-hued colors of the natural world, no longer restricted to the sepia tones of the tones of the nineteenth century or to the carefully calibrates white to black tonal scale of the early twentieth. Performance became an accepted art form in the late {\textquoteright}60s and early {\textquoteright}70s. Photographs of Happenings and Performance were included in avant-garde publications and increasingly began to enter museum collections. The art fields of the {\textquoteright}70s would be inclusive, hybrid, contingent, multivocal-challenging institutional spaces that had come to be considered canonical, elitist, didactic, hermetic.
If photography was considered as both index and sign in the post-modernist theoretical literature of the {\textquoteright}70s, art practice in photography increasingly reflected that discourse: a cross-fertilization of the disciplines of philosophy, materialist history, political science, literary criticism, and feminism. The canons that modernism had erected earlier in the 20th century and that were adapted to the production of photography seemed not relevant to the concerns of the {\textquoteright}70s or to the {\textquoteright}80s. I have chosen to examine the work of five photographers in this dissertation: Lucas Samaras, David Levinthal, William Wegman, Cindy Sherman and Louise Lawler. Each details different concerns and different histories of photography. As a group they react differently to particular aspects of modernism, but their dissident practices open up a discussion of both the multifaceted aspects of post-modernism and the rupture between modernism and post-modernism.},
	keywords = {Post-1945 Art},
	author = {Ehrenkranz, Anne}
}
