32116

SoSe 16: Theorizing American Photography

Heather Diack (Terra Gastprofessur)

Comments

This seminar introduces students to critical methodologies for studying American photography, interrogates the historic and aesthetic boundaries between art and documentary in the American context, and examines how the photograph has been established as the central mode of self-representation in the United States for both individuals and the nation at large. Other topics under consideration include, how the American landscape has served particular intellectual constructions of ‘nature’ in the American tradition, the ways in which attitudes towards social change, along with the history of poverty, immigration, and urban development in the United States, have evolved within American documentary photography, and how the American obsession with advertising and the media shape the production of contemporary modes of image-making. Using foundational art historical texts about photography as well as recent American studies approaches to the analysis of visual culture, we will examine the cultural and political work that photographs perform at particular historical moments. We will explore the larger discourses they participate in, with a focus on the contingent roles of race, gender, class, nation, and citizenship. close