This course surveys the history of photography from its earliest manifestations to the 1970s and considers photography's applications, as art, science, historical record, and document, among others.
The multifarious tradition of photography as social documentation is examined from the early nineteenth century to the present.
In addition to considering the ontology of the portrait, this lecture traces historical developments in portraiture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The interplay between photography and painting forms the core of the material.
The course investigates the objectives, methods, and outcomes of photography in various performative modes at several moments in the history of photography, including Victorian tableaux photography, fin-de-siecle pictorialism, the surrealism of the 1930s, and postmodern stagings and constructions.
In the decades after World War II photography's social and artistic roles changed in many ways. This turbulent period in the history of photography is the focus of this intensive seminar.
A survey of the far-ranging work of the peripatetic photographers of the nineteenth century
This seminar follows the parallel paths of photography and literature as their forms and objectives shift during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This seminar considers photography in its "high modernist" era (1900-1940) as a medium shaped by the key texts and events of modernism, such as the writings of Marx, Freud, and Bergson and World War I.
An examination of the history and practice of the photographic exhibition
This seminar investigates and evaluates contemporary photographic practices such as the use of appropriated and media images, alteration or manipulation of photographic prints, and the use of photography as one part of a larger installation or in a conceptual or performance context.