Dates & Assignments:
Dates below indicate the day on which each assignment is due. If a date is in bold, you must write a short response essay about one or more of the readings for that day and post it to the blog the night before the class meets. Plan ahead!
Essays marked (CEP) are in Alan Tractenberg, Classic Essays on Photography.
Essays marked (R) are in the Course Reader.
January 22 - Introduction: 'The Pencil of Nature,' Henry Fox Talbot (R)
January 24 - Early Photography - Origins: 'Memorie on the Heliograph,' J.N. Niepce (CEP), 'Daguerreotype,' Louis D.M. Daguerre (CEP), 'The Daguerreotype,' Edgar Alan Poe (CEP)
January 29 - Origins Cont.: 'The Modern Public and Photography,' Charles Baudelaire (CEP), 'The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,' Oliver Wendell Holmes (CEP), 'Idealism, Realism, Expressionism,' Henry Peach Robinson (CEP)
January 31 - The Photographic Age: 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,' Walter Benjamin (R), 'A Short History of Photography,' Walter Benjamin (CEP)
February 5 - Benjamin Continued: Diagnostic Essay Due
February 7 - No Class!
February 12 - Ontology: 'The Ontology of the Photographic Image,' Andre Bazin (CEP), Photography,' Seigfried Kracauer (CEP)
February 14 - Film - Edison and Meiles: 'Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives and Early Cinema,' Tom Gunning (R)
February 19 - Surrealism & Dada: 'Mechanism and Expression,' Franz Roh (CEP), 'Photography,'Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (CEP), 'The Age of Light,' Man Ray (CEP)
February 21 - Straight Photography and Social Realism: 'Social Photography,' Louis Hine (CEP), 'Photography and the New God,' Paul Strand (CEP), 'Pictorial Photography,' Alfred Steiglitz.
February 26 - Excerpt from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee and Walker Evans (R)
February 28 - Conceptual Photography: 'The Last Picture Show,' Douglas Fogle (R), 'The Anti-Photographers,' Nancy Foote (R)
March 4 - Paper 2 - First Draft: Peer Edit in class
March 6 - Conceptual Photography Cont.: 'Marks of Indifference,' Jeff Wall (R), 'Through the Camera's Eye,' Robert Smithson (R)
March 11 - Postmodern Photography: 'The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,' Douglas Crimp (R), 'Cindy Sherman: Untitled,' Rosalind Krauss (R)
March 13 - 'Seeing Sherrie Levine,' Howard Singerman (R)
March 18 - 'Souvenir Memories,' Rosalind Krauss (R), 'Prominence Given, Authority Taken: An Interview with Louise Lawler by Douglas Crimp' (R)
March 20 - Paper 2 -Second Draft: Trip to BAM
March 25 - No Class - Spring Break: Think about a final paper topic!
March 27 - No Class - Spring Break
April 1 - Contemporary Photography: 'Photography's Expanded Field,' George Baker (R)
April 3 - Library Research Trip
April 8 - 'Liquid Intelligence,' Jeff Wall (R), 'Gursky's World,' Peter Galassi (R)
April 10 - 'Out of Site, Out of Mind: The Sugimoto/Demand Effect,' Parveen Adams (R)
April 15 - Lorna Simpson (excerpt) (R), Tracey Moffatt: Laudanum (excerpt) (R)
April 17 - The DigitalThe Reconfigured Eye (excerpts), WJT Mitchell (R), 'Ectoplasm,' Geoffrey Batchen (R)
April 22 - The Digital cont.
April 24 - First Draft - Final Paper: Peer Edit in class
April 29 - Writing Workshop
May 1 - No Class - Individual Meetings
May 6 - No Class - Individual Meetings
May 8 - Last Day of Class - Wrap Up
May 15 - FINAL PAPER