20th-21st Century Photography: You Push the Button, We Do the Rest

4.0 credits · Undergraduate

Photography created a global image culture in the 20th century, thanks to the invention of film and the hand camera. This class surveys its modern uses for journalism, medicine, colonialism and its resistance, color photography, memory making, movie making, surveillance, racial justice, identity formation, space exploration, microscopy, and more. Special emphasis, however, is placed on the development of photography as a cornerstone of fine art around the world. The history of photography is outlandishly broad; so are the scope of this course’s lectures, in order to offer a powerful view of the kinds of pictures photography has made and how its magic has worked.