Visualizing Identity: Toward a Personal Lexicon of Self

Catalog description

The shifting ways in which identity has been articulated, both historically and contemporaneously—such as around class, race, gender, queerness, religion, diaspora, or the intersection of those ideas—makes this conceptual space one that is ripe for examination, deconstruction, and reformation along one’s embodied understanding of self. In this course, we will examine the work of photographers from the 19th century to the present. who have used various strategies—from documentary image-making to portraiture and self-portraiture, still-life, and landscape—to place identity at the center of their practice. Key contextual readings will provide an understanding of the histories and politics surrounding these practices. Concomitantly, through assignments and supported by in-class critique, students will experiment with these modes of image-making—ultimately creating a body of work that articulates, through imagery, the personal vocabulary of their identity/identities. THE CURRICULUM 184 Fashioning Fiction