Photography in Theory and Practice

Photography’s advent in 1839 brought into the world two inventions: a practical, functional means of making images with a camera, and a suggestive idea. This idea took many overlapping forms—the concept of nature automatically reproducing itself, of a picture radically dissimilar from the hand-made art that preceded it, of an analogic trace of the real world. This graduate-level seminar will use selected readings and class discussion to interrogate the relationship of photography as it has been theorized with its actual deployment in society and the world. Issues like medium specificity, ontology, the "index,” and cultural memory will be explored.