| This dissertation explores the nexus of the familial and the photographic in the work of three twentieth-century American women photographers: Imogen Cunningham, Nell Don, and Sally Mann. Revealing how they---and their reviewers---mobilized the familial frame within layers of publication, circulation, and narration, this project demonstrates that the familial functioned as a node of power through which controversy could be controlled, moderated, or generated. Mapping the production and reception of familial photographic nudes of men, women, children, and families at various moments throughout the twentieth century, my study argues that although perceptions of nudity and family fluctuated during the century, an essential belief in photographic veracity endured.;Chapter 1 reframes Cunningham's 1915 nudes of her newlywed husband. Unraveling the historical circumstances surrounding these transgressive familial photographs and their later reinscription into her oeuvre, my research uncovers how these images and events defined the photographer for posterity yet also obscured a career-long engagement with the male body. Chapter 2 examines the nostalgic, fabricated familial imagery by popular mid-century photographer Dorr in two book projects that attest to her faith in photography's ability to impart stories rather than document domestic realities. Reconsidering these women's careers in relation to the twentieth-century photographic canon and its gendered omissions further scrutinizes that incomplete historical narrative.;Chapters 3 and 4 position the familial frame within late-twentieth-century legislative and artistic contexts, in which societal shifts triggered the criminalization of certain photographic practices. Considering the liminal space between art and amateur production, Chapter 3 investigates the legal ramifications of nude photographs of children created ostensibly within the family. Chapter 4 juxtaposes these contrasting claims with Mann's photographs of her children, in comparison to those of male photographer Jock Sturges, delineating the collision of ideologies of art and family. Whereas claims to "art" deployed the familial to assure social acceptance of these images, my analysis indicates the post-war collapse of such "family" strategies as rationales for aesthetic practice. Looking specifically through the photographic lens, this study illustrates how the evidentiary and the erotic became entangled in familial and photographic discourses by the end of the century. |
