- Department: History of Art
- Credit value: 20 credits
- Credit level: I
- Academic year of delivery: 2024-25
This module explores key figures and theories in the history of photography, with emphasis on the range of scientific, aesthetic, and cultural meanings that emerged around its ‘invention’.
Occurrence | Teaching period |
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A | Semester 1 2024-25 |
Focusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this course offers an engagement with major theories and descriptive accounts of photography from its inception to the present day. What is a photograph, and what is it for? Should photography be understood as a technology or an artistic medium? How have photographs shifted our understandings of visual representation and our relation to the world? Special attention will be paid to the ways in which early photographic practices, and the writings that surrounded them, continue to define encounters with this elusive medium. Our goal is not only to develop and sharpen our understanding of photography and its discursive effects, but to find new ways of responding to it in our own critical writing.
Photographers considered may include Henry Fox Talbot, Louis Daguerre, Nicéphore Niépce, Hyppolite Bayard, Anna Atkins, Calvert Jones, David Octavius Hill, Nadar, Gustave Le Grey, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, James Van der Zee, Bill Brandt, William Eggleston, Roy DeCarava, Robert Adams, Zoe Leonard.
Writers considered may include François Arago, Edgar Allan Poe, Elizabeth Eastlake, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, John Szarkowski, Roland Barthes, Rosalind Krauss, Tina Campt, Christopher Pinney, Shawn Michelle Smith, Kaja Silverman.
By the end of the module, students should have acquired:
Task | % of module mark |
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Essay/coursework | 100 |
None
Task | % of module mark |
---|---|
Essay/coursework | 100 |
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