The city inhabits me: space, topology, and Gabriele Basilico’s Milan: Ritratti di Fabbriche

The 1975 New Topographics exhibition has been inscribed into photographic history as a starting point to which nearly all visually cognate practices can be traced back. This has held back more subtle and nuanced readings of much English and European work of the same era, particularly in the English-language press. Set in a more extended historical and geographical context, the work in the exhibition can be understood as part of a wider process of photographic exploration that took place alongside shifting patterns of production and consumption that transformed the global landscape in the decades following World War II. The exhibition also set out a specific position regarding the nature of topographic photography itself. Although New Topographics did not take an explicitly critical stance vis-a-vis landscape, one of its most enduring legacies has been the emergence of a ‘new topographics’ aesthetic that is understood as critically engaged simply by virtue of its distanced, deadpan style. To argue that particular photographers work in the topographic mode is thus to overlook the socio-political and geographical specificities of the places they represent, in favour of formal similarities. This paper examines Gabriele Basilico’s first project – Milan: Ritratti di Fabbriche (1978-80) – the photographs themselves, the context out of which they emerged, their presentation in book form, and Basilico’s own approach to the environments in which he photographed. As I argue, Milan: Ritratti di Fabbriche shares less than we might assume with the New Topographics work. Rather, it embodies a way of understanding and representing space as topological: heterogeneous and fluid, composed of multiple and often contradictory objects, processes and agents

The Feminine Awkward: Graceless Bodies and the Performance of Femininity in Fashion Photographs

Recent fashion photography has been preoccupied with awkward and uncomfortable poses. In fact, awkwardness – a negative affect comprising emotional and bodily discomfort – is part of the history of fashion photography. The ‘feminine awkward’ is proposed here as a formal and critical idiom for unpacking the relations that exist between the model, the photographic frame, and the camera, and for considering the way that the image is experienced by the viewer. The meaning of awkward fashion photographs is not only communicated directly, through various signifying practices; it also arises out of deeper emotional and bodily responses that accompany signification. The feminine awkward emerges most openly into fashion images during periods when gender norms are most forcefully contested, interfering with the trajectories of desire to which fashion images typically give rise. Culturally, it is aligned with paradigm shifts in social attitudes: with changing expectations of how a feminine subject should look and she should act. Looking at fashion photographs through the optic of the feminine awkward opens up new ways of thinking about the way that fashion photography simultaneously participates in, and unsettles, the production of gendered bodies

Promoting Healthy Communities and Preventing Childhood Obesity: Trends in Recent Legislation

Summarizes state legislation enacted in 2009 in the areas of healthy eating and physical activity, such as school nutrition and BMI measurements, and healthy community design and access to healthy food, such as safe routes to school and farmers' markets

Promoting Healthy Communities and Reducing Childhood Obesity: Legislative Options

Summarizes legislation proposed or enacted in 2007-08 in the areas of healthy eating and physical activity such as nutrition, physical education, and obesity prevention and treatment, as well as healthy community design and access to healthy food

Readjustment of a regional geodetic leveling network to account for temporally and spatially variable vertical displacement of benchmarks

This dissertation describes and analyzes the temporally and spatially non-linear nature of the vertical displacement of 1st order geodetic benchmarks in the lower Mississippi Valley and northern Gulf of Mexico coastal region. The least-squares method of adjusting redundant surveying observations is implemented to compute the most likely value of the most recent rates of displacement at node benchmarks within the network, along with estimates of the uncertainty of those values. Using that result, a modification of the standard method of adjusting geodetic leveling networks is developed and demonstrated to compute new elevations for the node benchmarks which accounts for both the temporal and spatial variability of the vertical displacement. The result of this re-adjustment computation is a new estimate of the current elevations of a framework of 1st order benchmarks that are generally lower than the official published values. This result has serious practical implications for the population and infrastructure within this region