Early Photography: Global Tech, Local Histories 1839-1914

Undergraduate

Photos are windows onto known and unknows places; they are an inseparable part of how we see and understand the world. In the age of Instagram, smartphones, and #Filter-#NoFilter we are all photographers, our very own curators of visual microcosms. We produce and consume photographic images almost constantly. We are now simultaneously master, subject, and audience in a transnational consumerist visual culture. This is remarkable seeing as the technology of photography has only been around for the past 180 years. No one could have foreseen the selfie as a potential technological application. The advent of photography in 1839 as a means of visual knowledge production was entangled with the rise of modern disciplines of ordering and categorizing knowledge about both people and places. Going beyond looking at photography merely as a technology invented in and disseminated from Europe, this course attempts to analyze “other histories” of photography, by looking at how this global technology was appropriated locally in Asia, Africa and the Americas. It is thus a global social history of the technology of photography. This course endeavors to give students the tools to analyze photos contextually, materially, and in terms of their content by looking at the first sixty years of photography. Specifically, this course looks at the intertwined histories of early photography and the formulation of modern disciplines by focusing on how early non-European anthropologists, geographers, and archaeologists incorporated photography in their methods of picturing place and the populace. Through thematic analysis and examination of different types of archival photos, students learn how to analyze photos both in the larger context of other visual sources, such as paintings, as well as textual sources. WR , HU W 9:25am-11:20am