First-Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: What is a Photograph?

Catalog description

In this seminar we will examine some of the most provocative ways in which photography has been imagined and practiced, from early accounts of the daguerreotype to recent work on the digital image. Through close examination of a range of photographic practices as well as the critical discourses that have grown up around them, we will endeavor to understand not just what André Bazin calls the “ontology” of the photographic image, but also how the photograph has been thought about, talked about, utilized and, in turn, produced fantasmatically as a particular kind of object and a special way of picturing. What, precisely, is a photograph? How have photographers and theorists answered that query? Do we draw upon the photograph's material, chemical, visible, invisible, affective, or discursive properties to describe the essential aspects of the medium? Like no other medium, the photograph is, at once, everywhere and, at the same time, functions in ways that we tend to allow ourselves to remain blind to. This course also serves as an introduction to the nature, processes, and perils of interdisciplinary study, as well as the practices of analytic writing and close reading of both visual images and written texts. Readings may include Azoulay, Barthes, Batchen, Bazin, Benjamin, Fox Talbot, Heidegger, Kracauer, Metz, Moten, Silverman, Smith, Sontag, Tagg, Wall.