Social History of Photography
[amalgam of courses taught at Pratt Institute, Rutgers University, & University of Rochester]
PART I: photography until 1919
The French author Roland Barthes described the emergence of photography in the early nineteenth century as a “truly unprecedented type of consciousness.” This course traces the emergence of this photographic consciousness as it develops within a number of specific arenas of culture and forms of representation, from the medium’s conception in the early nineteenth century to its industrialization in the early twentieth. In each session, the readings are meant to allow for general discussion of the history of photography with some detailed discussion of particular photographers, images, and texts about photography. Taken as a whole, the course materials offer us a chance to study photography as a cultural phenomenon as much as an art form, critically studying the various discursive arenas that this new medium helped to originate as well as redefine. Throughout the course we will also ask what makes photographic images so compelling, what we expect to see in them and what, if anything, distinguishes in the photographic realm a document from a work of art, an ephemeral image from a material object.
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).
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.
Graham Clarke, “What Is a Photograph?” in The Photograph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 11–25.
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
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.
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
Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, “Photography (1857),” in Trachtenberg, 39–68; Charles Baudelaire, “The Modern Public and Photography (1859),” in Trachtenberg, 83–89.
“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. THE AMATEUR & THE ARTIST: JULIA MARGARET CAMERON
Julia Margaret Cameron, “Annals of My Glass House (1874),” in Vicki Goldberg, ed., Photography in Print (Albuquerque NM: University of New Mexico, 1981), 180–87.
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.
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. 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
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): 702–23.
12. DOUBLE VISION
“Science and Social Science,” in Marien.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph (1859),” in Goldberg, 110–14.
Jonathan Crary, “Techniques of the Observer,” October 45 (Summer 1988): 3–35.
13. EVIDENCE OF THE INVISIBLE
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
“Modern Life,” in Marien.
John Herschel, “Instantaneous Photography,” Photographic News 4, no. 88 (May 11, 1860): 13.
Marta Braun, “Marey, Muybridge, and Motion Pictures,” in Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 228–62.
15. THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF MODERN LIFE
Jacob A. Riis, “Flashes from the Slums: Pictures Taken in Dark Places by the Lighting Process (1888),” in Newhall, 154–57.
Peter Bacon Hales, “Photography and the Dynamic City: 1890–1915,” in Silver Cities: the Photography of American Urbanization, 1839–1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 221–76.
16. NATURE, PICTURE, PRINT: NATURALIST DISCOURSE
“The Great Divide,” in Marien.
Peter Henry Emerson, “Naturalistic Photography (1889),” in Goldberg, 190–96.