Rhoades Seminar: Unamerican Photographs

Undergraduate / Graduate

Photography has played a pivotal role in the history and visual culture of the United States since the mid-nineteenth century, from Civil War albums to Nan Goldin's diaristic photographs of the downtown New York club scene during the AIDS crisis. Popular conceptions of photography often frame it as a 'democratic art' by pointing to its ease of use and low barrier to entry, implying a unique affinity to American democratic society and its values. This framing belies the contradictions at the heart of photography in America, which has been used to support projects of dispossession, racial hierarchy, and state violence, but also struggles for liberation, individual expression, and self-determination. Drawing on the Art Institute of Chicago's collection of photographs made in and about America from the nineteenth century to the present, this seminar will explore photography's role in establishing, sustaining, and critiquing some of the country's foundational narratives and principles. Who gets to be an American, and to whom does America belong? Who gets to be an American photographer, and whose photographs are allowed to represent America? What are 'American' values, and how have photographers tried to uphold or dismantle those values?