Course Description
Studies on the practices and theories of selected movements in photography, considering the dual nature of image function and concept, from original analog invention to digital forms of expanded media. Topics include documentary, fictional, experimental, and conceptual roles with photographers on practice, scholars, and critics on theory.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
Graduate students will conduct independent research in the
context of one or more of the course topics and present a public
lecture on that research.
Athena Title
Photography Pract and Theory
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
This course will offer unique perspectives on the working functions and interpretive meanings of photography as experienced by photographers and elucidated by the discourse of specialized scholars and critics in the field. As a complement to traditional studio art and art history curriculums, this course will teach students to think about art making in the context of their own time, with the awareness of related precedents, to realize their place in the educational continuum of the interdisciplinary experience.
Topical Outline
• The simultaneous invention of photography by artists and scientists originally unknown to each other, as an early example of the collaborative efforts of art and technology that remain essential to photography’s development to the present day. • The optical/chemical index of analog photography as the visual catalyst for modernism. • The photograph as both object and image in form versus content aesthetics. • The exploration of landscape frontiers and the complicated relationship between territorial discovery and dominance. • The expansion of the city and the opening social democratization of subject matter. • The politics of war and the battle between photography as reportage versus propaganda. • The photograph as fact, fiction, evidence, deceit, or all of the above as meta in post-modernist discourse. • Amateur and anonymous photography as cultural archives.