U.C. Berkeley History of Art

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COURSES FALL 2008

Histart 182

HISTORIES OF PHOTOGRAPHY (4 units)
Mondays & Wednesdays, 4-5:30
102 Moffit, CCN: 05547
Sarah Hamill

The advent of photography brought radical changes to both art and mass culture. Combining new visual perspectives with a reverence for past traditions and high artistic aspirations with a newly democratic approach to image-making, photography ushered in a new way of thinking about images and their place in society. In contemporary visual culture, photography is not only an art form but also a documentary record, a sentimental domestic practice, a commercial tool, and a symbolic cultural language. As such, photography can be seen to have multiple histories: aesthetic, technological, social, political, and economic. The aim of this course will be to explore these multiple histories by examining photography as a whole and the negotiations and interconnections between its various functions. Topics to be discussed will include photographic aesthetics, photography as a trace of the real, the rhetoric of the photographic image, gender and the photographic gaze, photography and postmodernism, and digital imagery. Readings include works by Beaumont Newhall, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Allan Sekula, Susan Sontag, Douglas Crimp, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and Geoffrey Batchen. (Mo)

Letters in bold following individual upper division course descriptions cite the History of Art major breadth requirement fulfilled by the course. (As=Asian, An=Ancient, Me=Medieval, R=Renaissance, B=Baroque, Mo=Modern.)