Art History 355
History of Photography

This course has been designed as a critical introduction to the history of photography from its origins in the desire to capture light and fix shadows to declarations of its death in the drive toward the digital. We will begin with the theoretical questions of what a photograph is, what it does, and how we look at and read photographs. We will return to these questions throughout the class. We will start our consideration of the history of photography with a study of the disputed beginnings of photography and the investigators who searched for ways to write with light and fix an image. We will also go back to look at the earlier imaging devices that shaped the development of photography and photographic seeing. We will consider disputes over the evaluation of photography as an "art," the collection of photographs, and the problems that inhere in attempts to turn historical photographs into museum objects.

The first unit of the course devotes attention to the photographic archive and to exploring the production and use of photographs as evidence, as storage devices for data and memories, and as a medium for the writing of history. The second and third units turn over the question of the documentary status of photographs by looking at practices of photography beyond Europe and the United States, by delving into the ethical and political issues involved in taking pictures of so-called "Others," and by considering resistant and subcultural tactics that work with or against photographs as tools of evidence or vehicles of dream, desire and fantasy. Over the course of the semester, we will look at the work of various practitioners of the medium of photography. But, this course is not a survey of names. The course emphasizes that to understand the history of photography means exploring the range of photography's social and cultural practices, including the catalogue, state surveillance, commercial advertising and mass media, photographic montages, collages, documentary photo-essays made to function as agents of social change, posed scenes and scenarios of desire, and avant-garde and postmodern art production.

The readings for the course will also introduce you to the important critics who have engaged with photography in their work and whose studies of photography demonstrate in various ways how issues of class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and economic, historical, and geopolitical relations of power are inseparable from the historical study of the medium of photography -- its practice, dissemination, valuation, and interpretation.

Course requirements include reading the essays on electronic reserve, participating in class meetings, and answering the short answer and multiple choice questions on two midterm exams and one final exam. In addition to the exams, you will also do an assignment that involves taking a photograph yourself. As you are free to use any type of photographic device including instant, one-step, and photo-booth technologies, the assignment requires no training and no technical or artistic skill. Rather, the assignment will ask you to reflect on how photography functions as an aid to memory and means to access the past as well as an everyday, non-specialized practice by taking a photograph yourself that responds to old photographs. No prior knowledge of the history of photography or art history is assumed or required.

P: So st or cons inst.