Decolonizing the Camera

Catalog description

In this course students will examine their own visual practice through the framework of decolonization. Through this process, students will engage with topics of race, representation, and power, while they build a visual practice that takes into account the complicated colonial legacy of photography. We will investigate the ways in which the camera has historically been used as a weapon of violence against those deemed as the Other. By approaching photography in such a way, students will gain a better understanding of how the camera works in racial time, which will result in a more informed and intentional practice of art-making. Throughout the course, students will engage in critiques, readings, and visual analyses that will support the cultivation of language to directly address the formation of otherness in image-making. Simultaneously students will be looking at contemporary lens-based artists who are working to correct this legacy from behind the camera in order to leverage the medium of photography as a tool of liberation. Students will employ these contemporary techniques to develop their own artistic practice.