History Of Photography

AY2018/2019 Semester 1

Through weekly slide lecture presentations by the professor, assigned weekly readings, quizzes, and group presentations, you will learn about various photo inventions, movements, and works in relation to diverse socio-historical-art contexts. By studying the past, you will learn to use history to inspire and understand new ways of seeing and visualizing the future in your chosen medium or academic pursuit. All assignments and images will be posted to the class OSS web page. In the first part of the course you will look at the developments of the medium up to the modern era. Beginning with the first description of the `elusive image? in antiquity and the first discoveries in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, illustrated lectures will trace the parallel development of artistic, commercial, scientific and social applications of photography. Attention will be paid to the relationship of creativity to technical innovation, especially in the early years in Europe and the US when photographers functioned simultaneously as artists, inventors and scientists. In addition, as the ongoing pendulum swings between documentary ?truth telling? methods and artistic pictorial, conceptual concerns will be examined.These directions wil be traced as well to South East ASIA. In the second part of the course you will be directed towards the different schools of photography, which from the beginning of the twentieth century started to be clearly defined, from documentary to pictorial to commercial. Closer examination of works by individual photographers will be viewed in tandem with theoretical issues that have emerged in recent scholarship and debates. Review and Enhancement: Each class begins a group presentation presenting 3 topics researched in more detail from the previous class lecture