American Photography

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course will explore the reciprocal relationship between American culture and photography over the past 175 years. We will examine the shifting cultural contexts that have influenced how and why photographs have been made and used in the U.S., but will also consider photographs themselves as artifacts of social structures and practices that may now seem alien to us. The course will begin with a history not just of photography, but of the desire to photograph before the process even existed, the desire to capture fleeting images. There will be an optional field trip to the National Gallery of Art to look at selections from their collection representing different photographic media as used by American artists, both historic and contemporary. Subsequent sections of the course will cover these broad areas: ? The “Selfie,” the “Other,” and the self as “The Other.” ? Photography as “Art” and photography as document. ? Photography of those on the economic and social margins, both urban and rural. ? Depictions of the American landscape as a virgin frontier, as the logical outgrowth of the Public Land Survey System grid, as anonymous industrial parks, as ecological disaster ? Photography on the street I hope to show two films, one on Vivian Maier the other about the families depicted in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans. There will be regular blog-writing assignments, two short papers, and one final project that will be a combination of writing and original photography. Purchased texts: Agee and Evans, Cotton Tenants Corner and MacLean, Taking Measures Across the American Landscape Dyer, The Ongoing Moment Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs Additional textual and visual resources will be available on Blackboard or provided in class.