Picturing America: Photography in American History

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course explores the history of photography in America, and the history of America in photography. Beginning with the medium's introduction in 1839, we consider the many ways in which photographic images have been used (and abused) to advance arguments, demarcate social boundaries, define racial and ethnic types, document poverty and injustice, and capture conflict. This course is also about looking and seeing, and how to look and see. The images we will consider in their context come first as a form of beguiling transport to a moment in time—a scene, a person, a place that is more immediate than any painting, drawing, or description. But they also invite work. The picture is not just a view, it is also, we will work to understand, a point of view that we will work to explore, examine, and, as best we can, to inhabit as we reconstruct and recreate the points of view and assumptions that helped to make them. This course invites students to see how US history shaped the development of photographic styles and technologies and how photography, photographers, and photographs have changed the course of US history.