History of Photography
Photography has grown up with modern life. Making sense of its history requires an understanding of its social and political functions, its integration with everyday experience, and its complex relationships to the history of art and the modern media. This course surveys photography from its public debut in 1839 to the present day and introduces students to the tools needed to interpret its varied uses and meanings.
Photography comprises a wide range of technologies and cultural practices. The significance of photographs has historically been centered in their persuasiveness as records, yet the medium has also served, from its inception, as a vehicle for fictions and fantasies, surveillance and control. Tracing photography's evolution as an art form while attending to its operation within fields like science, politics, sociology, journalism and medicine, we will open the persuasive nature of the photograph to closer scrutiny.
Students will learn to analyze photographs as constructed images, to incorporate visual analysis within historical argument, and to approach the diversity of photographic production from a broad historical and geographical perspective. The course will acquaint students with core principles and problems in the history of photography, with a selection of key historical sources and recent scholarly writings on the medium, and with a range of historically significant photographic practices and forms. For those without prior experience, the course also functions as an introduction to thinking and reading in the discipline of art history.
Textbooks/Other Materials: Will be available through Canvas. No textbook.
Course Requirements:
Intended Audience: Undergraduates
Class Format: Two 80-minute lectures per week and discussion section
Estimated Cost of Materials: $0-50
Keywords: camera, representation, documentary, fiction
HISTART Concentration Distributions: Transhistorical, Modern and Contemporary
