ARTH 266 - Little Histories of Photography, 1800-1980

FC ARHU

4 credits
This survey examines technologies, practices, and theories of photography from the turn of the nineteenth-century-with the first successful experiments on photosensitive paper-to the late twentieth, with the coterminous developments of digital photography and “postmodernism.” The sites of photographic production expanded rapidly across this period (from Europe to the rest of the world), as did the medium’s applications (from portraiture and scientific illustration to journalism and surveillance). To grasp the breadth of photography’s global archives, our class will be oriented around exemplary case studies-or “little” histories of photography, in the words of the German critic Walter Benjamin.

Prerequisites: one 100-level course in ARTH.