Prerequisite: Photography 105 or 106.

Photographers have traditionally sought to depict the nature of the human experience while working as historians, journalists, social crusaders, and artists, and this tradition continues even today by photographers such as Sebastiao Salgado, Eugene Richards, and Susan Meiselas. However, in the wake of much recent and not-so-recent theoretical thought that questions old humanist assumptions of "truth" and the privilege of the viewing subject, humanistic documentary photography finds itself in a poststructuralist bind where any photographic representation of the "human condition" is rendered suspect -- dominating, controlling, and objectifying. The multifarious tradition of photography as social documentation is examined from the early 19th century to the present. Two exams, writing assignments, and research paper. No prerequisites. Enrollment: 15.

Prerequisite: Photography 201 and 203.

The contest between realism and idealism has been central to the discourse of art for centuries. This debate took on particular force in 1839 with the advent of photography, which exploded previously imagined limits of the representation of the "real" in visual art. Until recently, painting and photography have typically been viewed as strange bedfellows in the world of modern art, rendered mutually exclusive by a set of essential differences. This course reconsiders those old assumptions and the shifting, often indeterminate positions of painting and photography around those seemingly opposite poles of the real and the ideal. We will also consider how and why painting and photography have each been embraced as the optimal medium of modernity in different moments. Finally, in addition to studying the historically determined differences between these two media, we will examine their common ground, and the implications of their new rapprochement through the technology of digital imaging. Significant reading in 19th and 20th century art, short writing assignment(s), gallery visit(s) and a final paper will be required. Prerequisite: at least one art history course or history of photography course.

This course will consider the tradition of landscape photography in America, from the great Western expeditions of the 1870s and '80s (not neglecting the Civil war battlefields of the previous decade) through the documents of the domestication of landscape, the philosophical approach of Stieglitz and Weston, the lapidary work of Adams, etc. After that we will consider whether landscape photography is possible any longer. In this context we will look at those photographers of recent decades who have documented the decay of the land and the growth of suburbia, notably the many revisionist photographers of the West (Robert Adams, Misrach, Klett, Jenschel, Goins, etc.), and then the recent landscapes of Sally Mann, which circle back to the Civil War. Two papers will be required.