Tableau Photography in North America and Western Europe 1980s-2010s: Analysis of Visual Languages

In the late 1970s, a new type of art photography began to emerge. These photographs were large-scale and complex compositions intended for display on the walls of museums and galleries. Subsequently, such photographs began to be labelled by the French term tableau. Tableau photography occupies a unique position in the context of contemporary art, as it demonstrated new representational possibilities of photography and created new practices of interaction with the beholder, which contributed to the re-evaluation of photography as a documentary medium. This thesis is devoted to the analysis of the visual languages of the tableau phenomenon and its systematisation. This work attempts both classical formal analysis and contemporary interdisciplinary methods to justify and validate a novel approach to analysing tableaux, taking into account its appeal to the beholder's attention and a thorough reconsideration of established conventions within photography.