Bachelor Thesis from the year 2013 in the subject Art - Photography and Film, grade: 78 % = 1, University of Westminster (Department of Media, Arts and Design), course: Photography Dissertation, language: English, abstract: "The strongest of Richter's effects of withdrawing the work from the viewer's gaze, is the creation of a softening blur as the final touch to all his Photo Paintings. Making the paintings, the artist firstly drafts his subject with a normally sized brush to create a "sharp" image (Fig.3). Having finished, he would come with a broader brush or a squeegee and blur the still wet oil paint (Fig. 4) to create the photographic effect of an out-of-focus image1. The blur in these paintings is not a trace of movement of the object in the photograph. This blur is an addition to the painting that does not relate to a form of haziness in the specific photographic source image, but to the general idea of vagueness, indecisiveness, anti-definition. Therefore, it mirrors the artist's attitudes towards life in an especially expressive way. The enlargement of the usual distance between what is depicted and the viewer are the basis of this effect. At first on a quite literal level: Richter introduces another layer of depiction in these paintings by creating the depiction of a depiction of an object. This places the object of the painting further away than usual from its maker and us as viewers (Butin, 2010). Secondly, on the level of reception: an image that stays "out-of-focus" from whichever distance we look at it rejects us, and refuses to communicate. This typical caginess of Richter's paintings, the exclusion of the recipient whom they are made for, is a striking effect in the encounter with these images. The analysis of the antithetic emotional effects of this simple but fascinating painterly technique is the theme of this essay."

Essay from the year 2010 in the subject Art - Photography and Film, grade: -, University of Westminster, language: English, abstract: Photography has played various roles in the African American Post-War Civil Rights Movement. Besides its extraordinary coverage of the contemporary Jazz scene and the historical documentation of the segregated South (Kasher, 1996), it had in particular a remarkable political function. Photography and television have given the Civil Rights fighters a voice which could not be ignored in Post-War America; by showing the struggle in all its unjust cruelty they confronted the national and international community with the shocking reality. People got motivated to express their sympathy for the demonstrators and the number of Movement supporters grew rapidly. Thereby, the most significant stream of followers arose only after the news media had shown images of unexpected outrage, making the relationship obvious (Streitmatter, 2008). In general, media do not only have a significant impact on public opinion but also contribute greatly to the success of humanitarian organisations. Often their influence even exceeds the possibilities available to politicians. This arises from the news media being the only source of information consumers get about developments further afield, making the success of civil rights movements highly dependent on their image given by press and television (International Council on Human Rights Policy, 2002). As one of these movements, the struggle for desegregation in America is the most thoroughly documented social conflict to date (Kasher, 1996). The tabloid Life, which can be seen as the national newspaper at the time (Shepherd, 1997), was reaching even more people than the new medium of television. For this reason, the magazine's understanding of the events, which was expressed by its presentation of images of the iconography of war - uniformed troopers, weaponed assaults, the wounded, state funerals - was spread w