Social History of Photography
[amalgam of courses taught at Pratt Institute, Rutgers University, University of Rochester, RIT, MICA, & Georgetown University]
Course readings
Abbreviations: Frizot – Michel Frizot, ed., A New History of Photography (Köln: Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft, 1994).; Goldberg – Vicki Goldberg, ed., Photography in Print (Albuquerque NM: University of New Mexico, 1981).; Marien – Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2015).; Newhall – Beaumont Newhall, ed., Photography: Essays & Images (New York: MoMA, 1980).; Trachtenberg – Alan Trachtenberg, ed., Classic Essays on Photography (New Haven: Leete’s Island Press, 1980).
PART I: photography until 1928
1: WHAT IS PHOTOGRAPHY? WHEN DID IT BEGIN?
Mary Warner Marien, “The Origins of Photography,” in Marien, 3–21.
Peter Galassi, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography exh. cat. (Museum of Modern Art, 1981), 11–31.
Jessica S. McDonald, “Helmut Gernsheim and ‘The World’s First Photograph’,” in Photography and Its Origins, eds. Sheehan & Zervigon (Routledge, 2015), 15–28.
2. INVENTION DISCOURSE
Primary sources
William Henry Fox Talbot, “A Brief Historical Sketch of the Invention of the Art (1844),” in Trachtenberg, 27–36
Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, “Daguerreotype (1838),”; François Arago, “Report (1839),” in Trachtenberg, 11–25
Edgar Allen Poe, “The Daguerreotype (1840),” in Trachtenberg, 37–38.
History & criticism
Anne McCauley, “Talbot’s Rouen Window: Romanticism, ‘Naturphilosophie’ and the Invention of Photography,” History of Photography (2002): 124–31.
3. LIKENESS & PRESENCE: EARLY PORTRAITURE
John Tagg “A Democracy of the Image,” in The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 34–59.
Geoffrey Batchen, “Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-de-visite and the Bourgeois Imagination,” in Photography: Theoretical Snapshots, ed. J. J. Long (London: Routledge, 2009), 80–97.
Annie Rudd, “Victorians Living in Public: Cartes de Visite as Nineteenth-Century Social Media,” Photography and Culture 9, no. 3 (2016): 195–217.
4. ART & INDUSTRY: THE ORIGINS OF PHOTO-CRITICISM
Primary sources
Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, “Photography (1857),” in Trachtenberg, 39–68; Charles Baudelaire, “The Modern Public and Photography (1859),” in Trachtenberg, 83–89.
History & criticism
“Popular Photography and the Aims of Art,” in Marien, 76–95.
Steve Edwards, “‘The Solitary Exception’: Photography at the International Exhibition, c. 1861,” in The Making of English Photography: Allegories (University Park, PA: Penn State, 2006), 165–203.
Sarah Kate Gillespie, “‘All Nature Shall Be Henceforth Its Own Painter’: The Intersection of Art and Daguerreotyping,” in The Early American Daguerreotype: Cross-Currents in Art and Technology (Cambridge: MIT, 2016), 57–107.
5. AMATEUR & ARTIST: JULIA MARGARET CAMERON
Primary sources
Julia Margaret Cameron, “Annals of My Glass House (1874),” in Goldberg, 180–87.
History & criticism
Victoria Olsen, “Muses, Models, and Mothers,” in From Life: Julia Margaret Cameron & Victorian Photography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 161–89.
6. A (SECRET) HISTORY OF MANIPULATION
Mia Fineman, “Picture Perfect,” in Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop, exh. cat. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 44–73.
Jordan Bear, “Shadowy Organization: Combination Photography, Illusion, and Conspiracy,” in Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 32–52
7. EMPIRES OF THE VISUAL: WAR & TRAVEL
“Imaging of the Social World,” in Marien.
Alan Trachtenberg, “Albums of War: On Reading Civil War Photographs,” Representations 9 (Winter 1985): 1–32.
John Falconer, “‘A Pure Labor of Love’: A Publishing History of The People of India,” in Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race & Place, eds. Hight & Sampson (Routledge, 2002).
8. IMAGES OF DIFFERENCE: PHOTOGRAPHY'S CITIZENRY
Kathleen Stewart Howe, First Seen: Portraits of the World’s Peoples, exh. cat. (London: Third Millennium Publishing, 2004), 12–37, passim.
Christopher Pinney, “Photography as Prophecy,” in The Coming of Photography in India (London: The British Library, 2008), 103–46.
Ali Behdad, “The Orientalist Photograph,” in Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation, eds. Behdad and Gartlan (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013), 11–32.
9. EMPIRES OF THE VISUAL: TRADITION & TRADE IN EAST ASIA
Kinoshita Naoyuki, “The Early Years of Japanese Photography,” in Tucker, ed., The History of Japanese Photography, exh. cat (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 14–35.
Claire Roberts, “China Exposed,” in Photography and China (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), 11–39.
10. HONOR & REPRESSION: THE AFRICAN AMERICAN PORTRAIT
Primary sources
Frederick Douglass, “Lecture on Pictures (1861),” in Picturing Frederick Douglass (2018), 126–141.
History & criticism
Shawn Michelle Smith, “‘Looking at One's Self Through the Eyes of Others’: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Photographs for the 1900 Paris Exposition,” African American Review 34, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 581–99.
Marcy J. Dinius, “Seeing a Slave as a Man: Frederick Douglass, Racial Progress, and Daguerrian Portraiture,” in The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 192–232.
11. ARCHIVE STYLE : SURVEYS OF THE AMERICAN WEST
Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View,” Art Journal 42, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 311–19.
Martha A. Sandweiss, “Westward the Course of Empire: Photography and the Invention of an American Future,” in Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (Yale University Press, 2002), 155–206.
Robin Kelsey, “Viewing the Archive: Timothy O'Sullivan's Photographs for the Wheeler Survey, 1871–74,” Art Bulletin 85, no. 4 (2003): 702–723.
12. DOUBLE VISION
Primary sources
Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph (1859),” in Goldberg, 110–14.
History & criticism
“Science and Social Science,” in Marien.
Jonathan Crary, “Techniques of the Observer,” October 45 (Summer 1988): 3–35.
13. EVIDENCE OF THE INVISIBLE: SCIENTIFIC & PSYCHIC PHOTOGRAPHY
Tom Gunning, “Invisible Words, Visible Media,” in Keller, ed., Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840–1900, exh. cat. (SFMoMA, 2009), 50–63.
Clément Chéroux, “Photographs of Fluids: An Alphabet of Invisible Rays,” in The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, exh. cat. (Yale University Press, 2004), 114–25, passim.
14. INSTANTANEITY & EFFECT
Primary sources
John Herschel, “Instantaneous Photography,” Photographic News 4, no. 88 (May 11, 1860): 13.
History & criticism
“Modern Life,” in Marien.
Marta Braun, “Marey, Muybridge, and Motion Pictures,” in Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) (University of Chicago Press, 1992), 228–62.
15. THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF MODERN LIFE
Primary sources
Jacob A. Riis, “Flashes from the Slums: Pictures Taken in Dark Places by the Lighting Process (1888),” in Newhall, 154–57.
History & criticism
Peter Bacon Hales, “Photography and the Dynamic City: 1890–1915,” in Silver Cities: the Photography of American Urbanization, 1839–1915 (Temple University Press, 1984), 221–76.
16. NATURE, PICTURE, PRINT: NATURALISM & PICTORIALISM
Primary sources
Peter Henry Emerson, “Naturalistic Photography (1889),” in Goldberg, 190–96.
History & criticism
Anne Hammond, “Naturalistic Vision and Symbolist Image,” in Frizot, 292–309.
17. PICTORIAL ANTHROPOLOGY & INDIGENOUS LIVES
Christopher Pinney, “Prologue: Images of a Counterscience,” in Photography & Anthropology (2011): 7–16.
Shannon Egan, “‘Yet in a primitive condition’: Edward S. Curtis’s North American Indian,” American Art (2006): 58–83.
18. KODAK & THE NEW AMATEUR
Primary sources
Alexander Black, “The Amateur Photographer (1887),” in Classic Essays on Photography (1980), 149–53.
History & criticism
Julie K. Brown, “‘Seeing and Remembering’: George Eastman and the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893,” Image (1996): 2–27.
19. WHAT IS THE TASK OF PHOTOGRAPHY? DOCUMENTARY ORIGINS
Primary sources
Lewis Hine, “Social Photography (1909),” in Goldberg, 109–14.
History & criticism
Molly Nesbit, “Photography and History: Eugène Atget,” in Frizot, 399–409.
Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography (1931),” in Selected Writings, 1931–1934 (Harvard University Press, 1999), 507–30.
George Dimock, “Children of the Mills: Re-Reading Lewis Hine’s Child Labor Photographs,” Oxford Art Journal 16, no. 2 (1993): 37–54.
20. CAMERA WORK: ART & IDEOLOGY
Primary sources
Paul Strand, “The Art Motive in Photography (1923),” in Goldberg, 276–87.
History & criticism
Allan Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning (1975),” in Goldberg, 452–73.
21. THE OPTICAL UNCONSCIOUS: DADA & SURREALISM
“Art and the Age of Mass Media,” in Marien, 233–275.
Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” October 19 (1981): 3–34.
Matthew Witkovsky, “The Cut-and-Paste World: Recovering from War,” in Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, exh. cat.(2007), 26–49.
22. THE SOVIET VANGUARD
Ossip Brik, “The Photograph Versus the Painting,” and “What the Eye Does not See,” (1926) in Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writing, 1913–1940 (1989), 213–220.
The Man with the Movie Camera, dir. Dziga Vertov (1929), 68 min.
Margarita Tupitsyn, “The Photographer in Service of the Collective,” in The Soviet Photograph, 1924–1937 (1996), 35–65.
PART II: photography since 1928
1. STRAIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY & ITS KINKS
Edward Weston, “Daybooks (1923–1930),” & Ansel Adams, “A Personal Credo (1943),” in Goldberg, 303–314; 377–380.
Carol Armstrong, “This Photography Which Is Not One : In the Gray Zone with Tina Modotti,” October 101 (2002): 19–52.
2. INDIGENOUS MODERN: MEXICO & PERU
Michele Penhall, “The Invention and Reinvention of Martín Chambi,” History of Photography (2000): 106–112.
James Scorer, “Andean Self-Fashioning: Martín Chambi, Photography and the Ruins at Machu Picchu,” History of Photography 38, no. 4 (2014): 379–397.
Ian Walker, “Manuel Álvarez Bravo: Surrealism and Documentary Photography,” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 8, no. 1 (2014): 1–27.
3. PHOTOGRAPHY, MASS-CULTURE, & POLITICS
Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography (1927),” trans. Thomas Y. Levin, Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (Spring, 1993): 421–436.
Paul Valéry, “The Conquest of Ubiquity (1928),” in Aesthetics: Collected Works, vol.13 (1964), 225–228.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (1936),” in The Work of Art... and Other Writings on Media (2008), 19–55.
4. NEW YORK CITIES: HARLEM RENAISSANCE & PHOTO LEAGUE
Ivor Miller, “‘If It Hasn’t Been One of Color’: An Interview with Roy DeCarava,” Callaloo (1990): 847–857.
Mason Klein, “Of Politics and Poetry: The Dilemma of the Photo League,” in The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo-League, 1936–1951 (2011), 10–29.
Emilie Boone, “Reproducing the New Negro: James Van Der Zee’s Photographic Vision in Newsprint,” American Art 34, no. 2 (2020): 4–25.
5. THE ART OF THE NEW DEAL: FSA MODERNISM
Primary sources
Roy Stryker, “The FSA Collection of Photographs (1973),” & Leslie Katz, “An Interview with Walker Evans,” in Goldberg, 349–354; 358–369.
History & criticism
Charles Johnson, “Introduction,” in The Photographs of Gordon Parks (Library of Congress & GILES, 2011): pp.
Svetlana Alpers, “Evans’s America: Life & Art,” in Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch (Princeton University Press, 2020), 113–157.
6. ATOMIC IMAGES: AMERICAN LIBERALISM
Primary sources
Robert Frank, “Statement (1958),” in Goldberg, 400–401.
History & criticism
“The Human Family,” in Marien, 321–335.
Blake Stimson, “Photographic Being & The Family of Man,” and “Photographic Anguish & The Americans,” in Pivot of the World: Photography & Its Nation (2006): 59–135.
7. PROVOCATIONS IN JAPAN
Primary sources
Nakahira Takuma, “For a Language to Come (1971??),” in Provoke: Between Protest & Performance (2016): pp.??
History & criticism
Kotaro Iizawa, “The Evolution of Postwar Photography,” in The History of Japanese Photography, ed. Tucker (2003), 208–259.
Matthew Witkovsky, “Provoke: Photography up for Discussion,” in Provoke: Between Protest and Performance. Photography in Japan 1960–1975 (2016), 469–479.