Description: |
This course examines the foundational texts of photography theories, those that give photography the potential significance to be a “theoretical object” (Michael Fried, 2008) for art and art history. We will read photography from the perspective of the history and theory of modernism (Baudelaire, Benjamin), photography’s autonomy and ontology in formalist criticism (André Bazin, John Szarkowski, Beaumont Newhall, Peter Galassi), photography and the question of medium (Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Rosalind Krauss), with reference to competing theoretical models that include but are not restricted to Marxism, semiotics and psychoanalysis, as well as postmodernist critiques of photography’s identity and essence (John Tagg, Allan Sekula, Victor Burgin). |