Photography and East Asia

4 credits · Undergraduate

“Photographs were curious things,” wrote the esteemed novelist Natsume Sōseki in 1910, “if one knew the person and then saw a photograph, it was easy to tell who it was, but the opposite – to guess the person from a photograph – was quite difficult.” Judging (private) persons from (public) photographs and vice versa, this course surveys the history of photography in East Asia, exploring the intersections between images and history, war and representation, citizenship and surveillance, self and other, memory and forgetting, landscape and extraction, beauty and the ordinary across modern and contemporary China, Japan, North & South Korea, and Taiwan.