FNMS 252 - Photography and Knowledge, 1830-1930

This course is a social history of photography which examines how the medium shaped categories of subjectivity in the 19th century (class, gender, race, nationality, for example). We study how photographic representations were a means to archive and classify fields of knowledge. The development of photography in this period intersected with the burgeoning sciences of ethnography and anthropology, and it was used in both topographical and expeditionary surveys. Faith in photography as a document made it a powerful witness to war, urban development, colonial expansion and social inequalities. While we study the work of photography’s more well-known practitioners from Europe and North America, our approach will not emphasize the aesthetic innovations of self-consciously artistic photography. Rather, we examine both professional and domestic photography as a means to produce knowledge about the world.

Credits 1

Notes
Cross-listed with ARTH 257

Area
Humanities

Division
Arts and Humanities

Compass Attributes
Humanities