Photography: Text, Image, Culture
Professor John Howard
King’s College London
Autumn Semester 2015
Duane Michals (American, born 1932)
Salvation, 1984
“Photography is subversive,” Roland Barthes insists, “not when it frightens, repels, or even
stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.” Assuming no previous formal training, this
course helps students think critically about photographic texts. It guides you through the everyday
postmodern barrage of images – so commonplace we scarcely notice – to carefully examine
particular pictures, series, documentarians, artists, and traditions. Hardly neutral objective windows
or mirrors on the world, merely framing or reflecting it, photographs bring order and meaning to the
world, actively shaping it. This course aims to find out how.
With a primary focus on the contextualized relationship between written language and
photographic image, our approach is threefold, exploring the history, theory, and practice of
photography. From early nineteenth century discoveries in France and Britain, to its rapid uptake in
the Americas, and dissemination across China, Japan, and beyond, photography borrows from genres
of painting (portrait, landscape, still life) and advances new conventions of its own (snapshot, closeup, street, fashion). From the daguerreotype to the camera-phone, from the darkroom to Photoshop,
the technologies change, whereas the output is often remarkably consistent – in the words of William
Eggleston, “a rectangle with an object in the middle of it.” Still, the best pics captivate, holding our
attention. To assess their multiple connotations, we’ll sample various theories: semiotic,
psychoanalytic, feminist, queer, critical race, and historical materialist. And we’ll look very closely
at the practice of photography, including world-class artists exhibiting in major museums and
galleries such as London’s Victoria & Albert, Tate, Serpentine, and Photographers. Since images
rarely come to us without words, we’ll continually contextualize with reference to text and culture.
This course should appeal to MA students with a limited background in visual culture studies,
whose primary interests instead lie in language and literature, history and humanities, or philosophy
and political theory. Students in media and film also might find it useful, as a means to revisit basic
concepts from new angles.
Required Texts:
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked
Shawn Michelle Smith, At the Edge of Sight
Week 1
An Introduction to Photographic History and Theory
Week 2
Pictorialism and Nineteenth-Century Art
Week 3
Landscape, Empire, and Constructions of East and West
Week 4
Documentary, Depression, and the Farm Security Administration
Week 5
Portraiture: Julia Margaret Cameron, Eudora Welty, Annie Leibovitz
Week 7
Nationalism & “American” Photography: Frank, Shore, Sternfeld, Strauss
Week 8
Region, Race, “Local Colour,” and William Eggleston
Week 9
Feminist Visions from Cindy Sherman to the Guerilla Girls
Week 10
Seeing Queerly: Baltrop, Biren, Volcano, Wojnarowicz, Gran Fury
Week 11
Globalization and Contemporary Art Markets