| dc.description.abstract | American photographer Dona Ann McAdams, although the recipient of off-Broadway awards, is not widely known or researched. Her photographs document key episodes in American cultural history in the late twentieth century and bear witness to otherwise lost people, events and places. They intersect with feminist and queer histories, performance art and the representation of mental illness in the visual arts. This research provides new perspectives on her work, its impact and its place in the history of American photography. Chapter One describes McAdams’ time at the San Francisco Art Institute and her early influences and evolving practice, as well as the later period when McAdams was the house photographer at non-profit performance space PS122, New York, between 1983 and 2006. Chapter Two explores the role of PS122 performance artists who were seeking social change in bringing the Aids crisis to public attention. Chapter Three follows McAdams’ championing of the artists who became known as the NEA Four, and who protested defunding and censorship by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990, and in the Supreme Court in 1998. Chapter Four details her longstanding workshops with institutionalised mental health patients. It explores the ethics of photographing and documenting marginalised communities and the relationship between McAdams’ photographic technique and empowerment. Chapter Five explores McAdams’ work on gentrification in the Lower East Side, Manhattan during the late 1980s. McAdams’ images have memorialised many of the condemned, now lost, sites in a series of images incorporated into an artist’s book in 1984. As the conclusion to this thesis confirms, her work witnesses and honours the underclass of society whose stories would otherwise be untold and provides a rich legacy for future scholars. | en_GB |
