Interrogating the spaces of personal photography : women, identity, and the cultural formation of photographic practice

Personal photographs permeate our lives from the moment we are born as they define who we are within our familial group and local communities. Archived in family albums or framed on living room walls, they continue on after our death as mnemonic artifacts referencing our gendered, raced, and ethnic identities. This dissertation examines salient instances of what women “do” with personal photographs, not only as authors and subjects but also as collectors, archivists, and family and cultural historians. This project seeks to contribute to more productive, complex discourse about how women form relationships and engage with the conventions and practices of personal photography. In the first part of this dissertation I revisit developments in the history of personal photography, including the advertising campaigns of the Kodak and Agfa Girls and the development of albums such as the Stammbuch and its predecessor, the carte-de-visite, that demonstrate how personal photography has functioned as a gendered activity that references family unity, sentimentalism for the past, and self-representation within normative familial and dominant cultural groups, thus suggesting its importance as a cultural practice of identity formation. The second and primary section of the dissertation expands on the critical analyses of Gillian Rose, Patricia Holland, and Nancy Martha West, who propose that personal photography, marketed to and taken on by women, double-exposes their gendered identities. Drawing on work by critics such as Deborah Willis, bell hooks, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, I examine how the reconfiguration, recontextualization, and relocation of personal photographs in the respective work of Christine Saari, Fern Logan, and Katie Knight interrogates and complicates gendered, raced, and ethnic identities and cultural attitudes about them. In the final section of the dissertation I briefly examine select examples of how emerging digital spaces on the Internet function as a site for personal photography, one that both reinscribes traditional cultural formations while offering new opportunities for women for the display and audiencing of identities outside the family.

Optimizing the size of the area surveyed for monitoring a Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) population in the Swiss Alps by means of photographic capture-recapture

We studied the influence of surveyed area size on density estimates by means of camera-trapping in a low-density felid population (1-2 individuals/100 km(2) ). We applied non-spatial capture-recapture (CR) and spatial CR (SCR) models for Eurasian lynx during winter 2005/2006 in the northwestern Swiss Alps by sampling an area divided into 5 nested plots ranging from 65 to 760 km(2) . CR model density estimates (95% CI) for models M0 and Mh decreased from 2.61 (1.55-3.68) and 3.6 (1.62-5.57) independent lynx/100 km(2) , respectively, in the smallest to 1.20 (1.04-1.35) and 1.26 (0.89-1.63) independent lynx/100 km(2) , respectively, in the largest area surveyed. SCR model density estimates also decreased with increasing sampling area but not significantly. High individual range overlaps in relatively small areas (the edge effect) is the most plausible reason for this positive bias in the CR models. Our results confirm that SCR models are much more robust to changes in trap array size than CR models, thus avoiding overestimation of density in smaller areas. However, when a study is concerned with monitoring population changes, large spatial efforts (area surveyed ≥760 km(2) ) are required to obtain reliable and precise density estimates with these population densities and recapture rates.

Solar radiation over and under sea ice and photographic quantification of Ice algal aggregates during the POLARSTERN cruise ARK-XXVII/3 (IceArc) in summer 2012

The ice cover of the Arctic Ocean has been changing dramatically in the last decades and the consequences for the sea-ice associated ecosystem remain difficult to assess. Algal aggregates underneath sea ice have been described sporadically but the frequency and distribution of their occurrence is not well quantified. We used upward looking images obtained by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to derive estimates of ice algal aggregate biomass and to investigate their spatial distribution. During the IceArc expedition (ARK-XXVII/3) of RV Polarstern in late summer 2012, different types of algal aggregates were observed floating underneath various ice types in the Central Arctic basins. Our results show that the floe scale distribution of algal aggregates in late summer is very patchy and determined by the topography of the ice underside, with aggregates collecting in dome shaped structures and at the edges of pressure ridges. The buoyancy of the aggregates was also evident from analysis of the aggregate size distribution. Different approaches used to estimate aggregate biomass yield a wide range of results. This highlights that special care must be taken when upscaling observations and comparing results from surveys conducted using different methods or on different spatial scales.