Isolating Madness: Photographs from Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, 1887-1907

<p>Frederic Truby King (1858-1938) is an eminent figure in New Zealand history. His name continues to flourish in contemporary society, due in part to its affiliation with the Royal New Zealand Plunket Society. However, the general populace is still relatively unaware of the time that King spent employed as the medical superintendent of Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, on the remote outskirts of Dunedin. The prevailing image of King during this period is of a single-minded physician, whose career was in a state of acceleration towards the establishment of Plunket. But historians like Barbara Brookes and Catherine Coleborne have rightly started to establish this epoch as significant in its own right. This thesis extends their work by engaging with previously unpublished casebook photographs of patients in King’s care, taken between 1887 and 1907, from the restricted Seacliff Lunatic Asylum archives. Through six case studies, this thesis draws connections between these photographs and the paradigms established by such internationally renowned photographers as Hugh W. Diamond and James Crichton-Browne. It then discusses some distinctive photographs that appear unique to this institutional environment, images that challenge our preconceived notions of psychiatric institutions and their functions. This visual history complicates, and sometimes even challenges, the argument about psychiatric institutions and disciplinary power proposed by Michel Foucault and John Tagg, by demonstrating the diverse forms of photography that can occur within a single institution. This study is part of a growing body of research on the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum archives. In using a largely untapped source of photographic history, this project will contribute to future research on similar topics.</p>

Isolating Madness: Photographs from Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, 1887-1907

<p>Frederic Truby King (1858-1938) is an eminent figure in New Zealand history. His name continues to flourish in contemporary society, due in part to its affiliation with the Royal New Zealand Plunket Society. However, the general populace is still relatively unaware of the time that King spent employed as the medical superintendent of Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, on the remote outskirts of Dunedin. The prevailing image of King during this period is of a single-minded physician, whose career was in a state of acceleration towards the establishment of Plunket. But historians like Barbara Brookes and Catherine Coleborne have rightly started to establish this epoch as significant in its own right. This thesis extends their work by engaging with previously unpublished casebook photographs of patients in King’s care, taken between 1887 and 1907, from the restricted Seacliff Lunatic Asylum archives. Through six case studies, this thesis draws connections between these photographs and the paradigms established by such internationally renowned photographers as Hugh W. Diamond and James Crichton-Browne. It then discusses some distinctive photographs that appear unique to this institutional environment, images that challenge our preconceived notions of psychiatric institutions and their functions. This visual history complicates, and sometimes even challenges, the argument about psychiatric institutions and disciplinary power proposed by Michel Foucault and John Tagg, by demonstrating the diverse forms of photography that can occur within a single institution. This study is part of a growing body of research on the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum archives. In using a largely untapped source of photographic history, this project will contribute to future research on similar topics.</p>

Ibiebe Alphabet and Ideograms as Motifs for Fabric Embellishment

The invented Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Ibiebe alphabet and ideogram (writing system) have not been explored maximally and redesigned as recurring motifs to embellish contemporary fabric. These are artistic codified graphical images that represent the visual translation of myths, legends, ideal concepts, and the philosophies of the Urhobo cultural heritage from Delta State. They are mostly explored in paintings and sculptural pieces for aesthetic and refinement purposes. Whereas, it is pertinent to encourage the integration of the creative potential of indigenous culture as visual concepts into contemporary works, since art is a potent medium for cultural dialogue. Therefore, this paper seeks to redesign the versatility and ingenuity embedded in Bruce Onobrakpeya’s formation as a recurring motif for fabric embellishment. It is essentially to provoke creativity, the development of knowledge, skills, in-studio experimentation/exploration, and the creation of new design possibilities with a diverse visual relationship. The Aesthetic theory propounded by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762) and the Modern Creativity theory by Kanematsu, H. and Barry, D. M. (2016) were adopted. The approach is exploratory and descriptive and relies on literal information. It will serve as an encyclopedia of redesigned motifs that cut across visual history.

Warring Visions

In Warring Visions, Thy Phu explores photography from dispersed communities throughout Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, both during and after the Vietnam War, to complicate narratives of conflict and memory. While the visual history of the Vietnam War has been dominated by American documentaries and war photography, Phu turns to photographs circulated by the Vietnamese themselves, capturing a range of subjects, occasions, and perspectives. Phu's concept of warring visions refers to contrasts in the use of war photos in North Vietnam, which highlighted national liberation and aligned themselves with an international audience, and those in South Vietnam, which focused on family and everyday survival. Phu also uses warring visions to enlarge the category of war photography, a genre that usually consists of images illustrating the immediacy of combat and the spectacle of violence, pain, and wounded bodies. She pushes this genre beyond such definitions by analyzing pictures of family life, weddings, and other quotidian scenes of life during the war. Phu thus expands our understanding of how war is waged, experienced, and resolved.

History Trails Assist in the Detection of Hostile Intentions

Detecting hostile intentions from movements alone is important in many real world scenarios. The current paradigm investigated how visual history trails might aid in the detection of two hostile movement behaviors on a simple display. Participants controlled movement of an icon representing their own ship, while six other ships moved around them. A single ship displayed one of two target hostile behaviors: shadowing (mimicking usership’s movements) or hunting (approaching the usership). Moving their own ship, participants attempted to identify the hostile ship and behavior with history trails that reflected the past nine movements, and without history trails. Detection accuracy was superior with history trails present. History trails also provided a notable benefit for detecting hunting when the hostile ship started farther away from the usership. History trails may be a suitable aid for improving detection of hostile behaviors, but even in this simplified scenario, detection rates remained far from optimal.

“War on Terror”: The Limitation of Representation of the Film

History was always written by the winners. Despite the fact that the history of the War on Terror is relatively new, Hollywood is quick to develop a visual history of the conflict. Hollywood’s excellent realism aesthetics were successful in justifying the goal and method of the “war on terror,” interrupting ongoing reality to influence and reconstruct public memory about what happened. This dissertation will use three awarded and influential case studies: The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty and American Sniper to demonstrate the fragmentation of film representation, that the film only speaks for “us.” The dissertation aims to uncover the hidden political unawareness behind film representations, the manner in which those films provide limited versions of what happened, and how the films emphasise the self-subjectivity while objectifying the other.

The 1957 Central High crisis: civil rights and education in the United States as a public history experience through the Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History

Through an oral and visual history archive, we sought to develop an analysis regarding the period of school segregation in the United States, as well as the moment known as “integration”. Drawing on the experiences recorded in The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, an analysis based on the memories of the period of overcoming segregation in the school context was developed. Our focus was on the perception of the persistence of prejudice as a factor that harms the learning process, as was observed in Terrence Roberts’ speech. The orientation of the work within the sphere of public history aims to show how people simultaneously experience a conflicting situation and the problem of abandoning the past, bearing in mind the continuity of the issues faced and which need to be reestablished.