Courses and Requirements

Photography 101
Introduction to Photography
An introduction to both the techniques and the aesthetics of black-and-white photography as a means of self-expression

Photography 105
Photographic Seeing
An exploration of the visual grammar of photography and how it clarifies a photograph's meaning and the photographer's intent.

Photography 106
Light
This course deals with the exploration of found light and artificially detonated light (strobe).

Photography 201
The View Camera
The operation of the view camera and advanced darkroom techniques are demonstrated in this course.

Photography 203
Color Photography
An introduction to the problem of rethinking photographic picture-making through the medium of color photography. This is an introductory course in the use of Adobe Photoshop for image processing. Emphasis will be placed on exploring digital photography from a technical and a theoretical perspective. In addition, students rethink photographic picture-making through the medium of color photography.

Photography 301-302
Advanced Photography
To prepare the student for ongoing independent work, this course emphasizes the exploration of visual problems.

Photography 401-402
Senior Project
Working with a faculty advisor, all senior photography majors complete a yearlong tutorial culminating in an exhibition.

Photography Sem
Senior Seminar
Senior Seminar is a component of the senior project and is an integral part of the credits earned for Senior Project. The seminar helps students prepare and finalize their capstone exhibition. Guest artists visit regularly to share their life and work as students prepare for life after Bard.

Photography 110
History of Photography
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.

Photography 213
Qualities of Life: Photography and the Human Condition
The multifarious tradition of photography as social documentation is examined from the early nineteenth century to the present.

Photography 214
The Portrait and Its Guises in the Modern Period
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.

Photography 215
Photography and Performance
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.

Photography 310
From Human Documents to the Image World: Photography, 1950-1990
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.

Photography 312 A
Travel and Exploration in Nineteenth-Century Photography
A survey of the far-ranging work of the peripatetic photographers of the nineteenth century

Photography 320
Literature and Photography
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.

Photography 322
Photography and the Modernist Creed
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.

Photography 340
Photography Exhibitions
An examination of the history and practice of the photographic exhibition

Photography 410
Contemporary Photography and Critical Theory
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.