Taking our point of departure from Alan Trachtenberg’s seminal Reading American Photographs (1990), this survey class introduces students to the history and contemporary practice of “Camera Work” (Stieglitz) in North America. We will trace documentary photographic practice from Jacob Riis’ and Lewis Hine’s early endeavors in the 19th century through Robert Frank’s street photography and Diane Arbus’s daring photos of marginalized groups to the contemporary visual experiments by Stan Douglas or James Casebere. “Practices of looking” (Sturken/Cartwright) will be discussed along with a plethora of theoretical work on photography, ranging from Susan Sontag’s and Roland Barthes’s classic studies to more recent additions such as Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography by visual culture scholar Shawn Michelle Smith, or Photography after Photography by feminist critic Abigail Solomon-Godeau.
Will this then be a class ‘without literature’, without much reading? No. Reading photographs as rich cultural texts demands the inclusion of respective novels, poetry, or plays and the analysis of text-image relations in order to achieve at a more thorough understanding of the crucial and contested term of culture.
