Expanded Darkroom: Hybrid Photographic Strategies

Catalog description

Expanded Darkroom bridges analog traditions and digital futures to explore new possibilities of image-making, providing an experimental space for students to reimagine photography at the intersection of art, society, and technology. This course offers a platform to push photographic information in new directions, discover unexpected outcomes, and develop work that is both conceptually grounded and visually experimental. The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence is reshaping culture, politics, and the ways we understand images. The photograph has become a flexible site of meaning, an artifact continually open to transformation through manipulation and reinterpretation. Expanded Darkroom invites students into an experimental laboratory where ideas take form through alternative photographic methods and materials. This course explores the social, theoretical, and historical connections between analog and digital practices, paying attention to how these modes of image-making overlap, diverge, and influence each other. Students will examine how experimentation—whether through play, risk, failure, or the balance between control and chance—can shift the meaning of a body of work. Emphasis will be placed on research-driven, conceptually grounded projects that highlight process as both a generative tool of discovery and a form of critique. Through intentional yet flexible approaches, students will develop work that demonstrates how images can be reimagined, reconstituted, and transformed. Expanded Darkroom provides a platform for the curious, offering space to push photographic information in new directions while embracing the unexpected possibilities that emerge along the way. Through hands-on experimentation, students will engage with play, failure, chance, and control as integral aspects of the creative process.