AH20220 History of Photography

Academic Year 2023/2024

** UPDATE for 2023-24: We are excited to share news that this module will be amplified in Spring 2024, owing to the recent acquisition of an important teaching collection of photography by the School of Art History and Cultural Policy, totaling more than 250 prints and objects, spanning the entire history of photography since 1840. Students enrolled in this module will have the opportunity to take part in small group handling sessions in the School, where we will be working with original photographic artefacts from the 19th - 20th century -- from daguerreotypes to albumen prints to Polaroids -- as well as cameras, photo-magazines, and other optical devices. This is a fantastic opportunity to encounter photographic media first-hand, and learn directly about their processes, history, and materiality. Art history major students, as well as elective students from other subjects, are welcome to enrol. **

This module surveys the history and theory of photography, beginning with its origins in the nineteenth century, and concluding with post-WW2 developments in photographic practice. We will examine the photograph both as a documentation of the world and as a work of art, reflecting on its technological and aesthetic evolution, and how the act of photography was (and is) a scientific, cultural, and aesthetic practice. How has photography revolutionized our ways of seeing? What is the relationship between photography and other forms of visual art and representation? What questions about looking at others, and representing ourselves, does it provoke? Following a roughly chronological structure, we will discuss the contribution of key photographers and important stylistic moments throughout its history. The history of photography in Ireland will also form an important dimension of this module. This module comprises lectures, in-class exercises, and special small-group hands-on tutorials utilizing the Kingsley Photographic Teaching Collection.

A central aim of this course is to develop students’ fluency in analyzing photographs and the conditions of their production and reception, including the ability to identify photographic processes and techniques. Topics will include the innovations of early photography; pictorialism and ‘straight’ photography; photographic portraiture; photojournalism and war photography; photography and modernism (abstraction, surrealism, the ‘New Objectivity’); colour processes; and the role of the photograph as ‘document’ and photographer as ‘witness’.