Photography & the Self

[amalgam of seminars taught at Pratt Institute & University of Rochester]

While the “selfie” phenomenon continues to thrive in global pop culture, what the term signifies remains unclear. Much as how the uncritical term “picture” is used to describe any photographic image, the neologism “selfie” first denoted self-portraiture of a special kind, but has also come to function mistakenly for any photo-portrait of a living being. Behind such lexical confusion is a larger generative force at work: photography’s pervasive role in framing selfhood, subjectivity, and identity in the modern era. Since its invention, the photographic image has framed and reframed the fluid concept of the self through various artistic, social, technological, and conceptual practices. Engaging philosophy, art history, and photography theory, this course examines how photography has been used to give shape to various philosophies of the self, from the theory of autonomy put forward by philosophers of the Enlightenment to that of identity mediated by social discourse as proposed by more contemporary critical theorists. Together, we will examine various episodes from the history of photography since 1839, from the exploration of Romantic subjectivity by the inventors W.H.F. Talbot and Hippolyte Bayard, to the performance of class identity in the portrait studios of nineteenth-century Paris and twentieth-century Bamako. Furthermore, we will explore the postmodern concept of self as simulacrum (a copy without an original) in the work of artist Cindy Sherman, and turn an informed, critical eye toward the “selfie” as a form of public spectacle in contemporary art and culture.

Course readings

1. THE SELFIE PROBLEMATIC

Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978), 31–51; 71–99.

Joan Acocella, “Selfie: How Big of a Problem Is Narcissism?” The New Yorker, May 12, 2014. [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/12/selfie]

Alex Balk, “Is a Selfie Any Visual Representation of Any Object?” The Awl, March 29, 2016. [https://www.theawl.com/2016/03/is-a-selfie-any-visual-representation-ofany-object/]

2. “EVERY PHOTOGRAPH IS A PORTRAIT”

Richard Brilliant, “Fashioning the Self,” in Portraiture (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), 45–88.

Vilém Flusser, “The Gesture of Photographing,” trans. Roth, Journal of Visual Culture 10, no. 3 (2011): 279–293.

Euripides Altintzoglou, “Digital Realities and Virtual Ideals: Portraiture, Idealism, and the Clash of Subjectivities in the Post-Digital Era,” Photography & Culture 12, no. 1 (2019): 69–79.

3. SOURCES OF THE SELF: DESCARTES & AFTER

Jonathan Crary, “Techniques of the Observer,” October 45 (1988): 3–35.

Charles Taylor, “Descartes’s Disengaged Reason,” and “Locke’s Punctual Self,” in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 143–76.  

Gen Doy, “I Think Therefore I Look,” in Picturing the Self: Changing Views of the Subject in Visual Culture (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 11–34.

Judith Butler, “How Can I Deny that These Hands and This Body Are Mine?” in Senses of the Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 17–35.

4. ROMANTIC SUBJECTIVITY

Geoffrey Batchen, “Le Noyé,” in Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 157–173.

Anne McCauley, “Talbot’s Rouen Window: Romanticism, ‘Naturphilosophie’ and the Invention of Photography,” History of Photography 26, no. 2 (2002): 124–131.

Jan von Brevern, “Resemblance After Photography,” Representations 123, no. 1 (Summer 2013): 1–22.

5. STUDIO-MADE: NINETEENTH-CENTURY SEX & CLASS

Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Legs of the Countess,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 65–108.

Geoffrey Batchen, “Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-de-visite and the Bourgeois Imagination,” in Photography: Theoretical Snapshots, ed. 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.

6. AGENCY & THE FEMININE IN VICTORIAN PHOTOGRAPHY 

Julia Margaret Cameron, “Annals of My Glass House (1874),” in Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, ed. Goldberg (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981), 180–187.

Jordan Bear, “The Silent Partner: Agency and Absence in Julia Margaret Cameron’s Collaborations,” Grey Room 48 (June 2012): 78–101.

Carol Armstrong, “From Clementina to Käsebier: the Photographic Attainment of the ‘Lady Amateur’,” October 91 (Winter 2000): 101–139.

7. SURREALISM & THE SPLIT SUBJECT

Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience (1949),” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 75–81.

Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” October 19 (Winter 1981): 3–34.

Ruth Iskin, “In the Light of Images and the Shadow of Technology: Lacan, Photography and Subjectivity,” Discourse 19, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 43–66.

Gen Doy, “Masks, Masquerades, and Mirrors,” in Claude Cahun: A Sensual Politics of Photography (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 36–80.

8. DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS: RACE & IDENTITY IN AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Negative-Positive Truths,” Representations 113, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 16–38.

Erina Duganne, “Roy DeCarava, Harlem, and the Psychic Self,” in The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2010), 132–67.

Huey Copeland, “‘Bye bye black girl’ – Lorna Simpson’s Figurative Retreat,” Art Journal 54, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 62–77.

9. THE POSTCOLONIAL SUBJECT IN INDIA & MALI

City of Photos, directed by Nishtha Jain (2004, 60 minutes), DVD.

Elizabeth Bigham, “Issues of Authorship in the Portrait Photographs of Seydou Keïta,” African Arts (Spring 1999): 56–67; 94–95.

Malick Sidibé, “Ready to Wear: A Conversation with Malick Sidibé,” by Michelle Lamuniere, et al., Transition 88 (2001): 132–59.

Christopher Pinney, “Notes from the Surface of the Image: Photography, Postcolonialism, and Vernacular Modernism,” in Photography’s Other Histories, eds. Pinney and Peterson (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2003), 202–20.

10. PHOTO-SIMULACRA: POP & POSTMODERNISM

The Eyes of Laura Mars, directed by Irving Kershner (1978, 104 minutes), DVD.

Douglas Crimp, “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” October 15 (Winter 1980): 91–101.

Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra (1981),” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. Storey (Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2006), 389–396.

Cherise Smith, “Nikki S. Lee’s Projects and the Repackaging of the Politics of Identity,” in Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 189–230.

11. EMPTY AFFECT: THE VOIDED SELF IN POST-CONCEPTUAL ART

Gordon Hughes, “Game Face: Douglas Huebler and the Voiding of Self Portraiture,” Art Journal 66, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 52–69.

Julian Stallabrass, “What’s in a Face? Blankness and Significance in Contemporary Photography,” October 122 (Fall 2007): 71–90.

Benjamin Buchloh, “Residual Resemblance: Three Notes on the Ends of Portraiture,” in Formalism and Historicity: Models and Methods in Twentieth-Century Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 471–508.

12. MIRRORS WITH MEMORIES: SELFIE CULTURE

Alice E. Marwick, “Instafame: Luxury Selfies in the Attention Economy,” Public Culture 27, no.1 (2015): 137–160.

Derek Conrad Murray, “Notes to Self: The Visual Culture of Selfies in the Age of Social Media,” Consumption Markets & Culture (July 2015): 1–27.

Nathan Jurgenson, “Real Life,” in The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (London: Verso, 2019), 53–112.