Sections offered FALL 2023:
#8681 |
STEVE RAYMER |
MW 1:15 PM–2:30 PM |
HU 217 |
CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd S&H credit; COLL (CASE) S&H Breadth of Inquiry credit
This survey course looks at how photography, and photographers, have shaped the collective memory of our society and culture during two-plus centuries.
Students will explore photography, and the people who make images, in three broad categories: Communication, fine art, and photography as a tool of science and technology.
We will begin with the psychology of human vision and how the invention of photography in the early 19th century changed the way we see the world. Central to this introduction with be the work of French painter and printmaker Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851) and his astonishingly precise pictures called daguerreotypes. These one-of-a-kind images recorded on a highly polished, silver-plated sheet of copper revolutionized society. Now long were portraits of the political and social elites the only ones hung in galleries and homes. Suddenly, photographers were able to document ordinary Frenchmen and women where they worked and lived in far more modest circumstances. Moreover, from the moment of its birth, photography had a dual character – as a medium of artistic expression and as a powerful scientific tool—and Daguerre promoted his invention on both fronts.
The class also will examine the work of other early photographers, from the first photojournalists – Roger Fenton in the Crimean War and Mathew Brady, and his assistants, who documented the American Civil War. Soon, one of the most influential photographers of the early 20th century, Edward Steichen, became a groundbreaking innovator in the fields of photography in art and fashion. Steichen opened the galleries of what was called the Photo-Secession Movement and was the first to present Picasso, Brâncusi, and a range of progressive photographers to the American public.
During this introduction to “How Photographers Changed History,” I will ask students to write short 300-to-400 word reaction to the pictures they see and how these images relate to the themes of the class. Midway through the course, I will arrange for students to visit the IU Art Museum, the Kinsey Institute, and IU Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology to see, feel and study the works of these, and other early photographers whose picture span all three themes of the course – communication, fine art, and science and technology. I am particularly excited about students being able to see the images of the North American Plains Indians by Edward W. Curtis, whose work is held at the former Mathers Museum.
As students become more conversant in the language of photography, they also will use their mobile phones to learn about taking four basic categories of photographs: close-up photographs, environmental portraits, more complicated artistic compositions, and finally how to expand and condense time by manipulating one of two important parts of the camera – the shutter.
Students also will be exposed to some of the great visual communicators of the 20th and 21st centuries, including those who used new and rapidly-changing technologies to record conflicts from World War II and Vietnam to the present-day war in Ukraine, where photojournalists who have set a new standard in making intimate, powerful images that leave no doubt that there is no glamor in war, only pain.
Beyond the conflict photography that permeates our media today await legions of unsung image-makers who have served as society’s professional eyewitnesses to history, exposed social problems like child labor and global epidemics, and importantly, photographers since the invention of the medium in 1830 who have endeavored to show us our common humanity. (Think of the view of Earth from 36,000 nautical miles away photographed from the Apollo 10 astronauts or the Museum of Modern Art’s 1955 exhibition the “Family of Man” that thematically grouped images from many cultures around themes such as love, children, and death.)
To this end, we will develop three additional themes — the eyewitness, chronicler of social problems, and storyteller of our common humanity. Students will study the work of photographers as diverse as anthropologist Lewis Hine, whose worked help pass the first U.S. child labor laws, and Richard Avedon, who forever changed the look of fashion photography after World War II, to the imaginative portraitist Annie Libovitz of Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Vogue magazines fame.
Finally, I plan to recruit one or more astronomers to speak with students about the astonishing and life-changing images of the galaxies recorded by the NASA Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes. As NASA says of these technological marvels, light from these galaxies took billions of years to reach us. Today we are looking back in time to within a billion years after the “big bang” when viewing the youngest galaxies in in the heavens. This finale to the course will offer students an opportunity to select and write about their favorite images in the galaxies, and reinforce the idea that photographers play a vital role in the science and technology of our times.