First-Year Writing Seminar: Writing(s) on Photography

Catalog description

Since its inception writers, academics, poets, artists, public intellectuals, and philosophers have been grappling with the nature, purpose, and effects/affects of photography and the photographic image. In this seminar we will study the ways in which photography and the photographic image have been written about from the nineteenth century to the present. Writing assignments will include weekly reading responses, exercises involving the description of photographic works (formal, semiological, and affective), writing an accompanying text to their own or someone else’s photographic works (a rationale or artist’s statement), and a final essay/review of a photographic exhibition. A creative component (for those who are photographically inclined) may include photographic responses to the texts. Readings will include texts by Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Jacques Rancière, Siegfried Kracauer, Rosalind Krauss, Allan Sekula, László Moholy-Nagy, and others.