The Assignment: Photography, Context, and Response from Classrooms to Commissions

Graduate / Professional

Photographers continue to find themselves navigating the multiplicity of “contexts” their medium inhabits. This course examines various historical and contemporary examples of photographic “call and response” wherein artists find their way within both the obstacles and the opportunities presented to them by clients, curators, and editors, and (as students and teachers) within various pedagogical models. Through lectures, individual case studies, and student presentations we look to examples of authorship, artistic integrity, self-reflectivity, the exceeding of expectations, and convention-defying subversions that might just as readily be deployed within the context of a fashion spread as a museum, biennale, or government commission for an original work. 3 Course cr F 1:30pm-4:30pm