History of Photography

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course introduces key methods, terms, and themes in the history of photography, charting a path from its origins in nineteenth-century European art, science, and industry, to the myriad artistic and cultural adaptations of digital photographic media in the global present. As an object of study, photography’s attraction is that there remains no aspect of modern life – from birth to death, from sex to war, from atoms to galaxies, from the cheapest commerce to the most valuable art works – that is not touched by it in one way or another. Photography is a class of images and a practice that thoroughly infiltrates and mediates the world around us. This ubiquity, or everywhere-ness, poses a unique problem for history, theory, and practice: how do we develop a coherent method of analysis for something so spread across (modern) time and space? How can we speak with equal sensitivity about the photograph as a product of optics, chemistry, software, and hardware, as well as what it claims to represent with such exacting fidelity? How can we identify the meaning of a photograph when that meaning is so heavily determined by its specific context, its movement through information cultures, as well as its use in social rites and rituals? Throughout the course, we will address these questions through a close study of photography’s history in relation to social and material conditions from 1839 to the present. To this end, you will be actively engaged in looking closely at images, in addition to reading scholarship, commentary, and criticism related to our most abundant technical image: the photograph. For more information about this and other courses in the Department of Art and Art History, please visit https://art.georgetown.edu This class is not available to audit.