Beginning with its invention in the 1830s and concluding with the use of digital media in the twenty first century, this seminar examines the history of photography as a visual and cultural practice. Ranging from fashionable carte-de-visite to criminal mug shots, to photography’s instrumental use by scientific communities and its unstable position within the fine arts, we explore the ways photography has negotiated (and continues to negotiate) its status as an artistic medium, an instrument of scientific inquiry, and a communication device. Above all, this course devotes considerable attention to photographic practices, specifically those pertaining to ethnography and race, which upheld (and continue to uphold) systems that give rise to experiences of power and marginalization. Rather than focus exclusively on moments of marginalization, however, we also will shed light on the ways the camera was used to undermine abuses of power and injustice; for instance, we will investigate how figures like Frederick Douglas and W.E. B. Du Bois envisioned photography’s uses. We will ask: what standards of utility and validity determine/d photography’s use in diverse contexts? How did/does its various uses inform its subsequent development as a medium and an imaging technology? How did/do photographers use the medium to construct racial identity? Students will come away from this course not only with a knowledge of the scope of photography’s history, but also with an understanding of the degree to which photography became a ubiquitous feature of our intellectual and cultural lives.
Shana Cooperstein
Dr. Shana Cooperstein specializes in the art of the long 19th century, particularly as this concerns the material practices of artistic production, representational theory, and the history of scientific imaging. As demonstrated by her publications in Leonardo, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide and Grey Room, among others, her interdisciplinary scholarship is motivated by unresolved questions about the role of human sense perception in the development of art-making strategies. “Drawing Pedagogy in Modern France: Habit’s Demise,” a book manuscript under contract with Routledge, examines schematization, the education of the eye and other problems central to the history of art instruction in the modern era.
