ARTH243

Provides a loosely chronological overview of diverse photographic production beginning with early optical devices such as the camera obscura and continuing to contemporary digital practices. Students will have the opportunity to become familiar with various photographic processes and techniques (daguerreotypes, albumen prints, platinum prints, pinhole photography, color, and others); styles and movements (f64, street photography, postmodernism, and others); individual practitioners; and theories of photography proposed by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and others. Students may also explore how and why the history of photography has been, only recently, integrated into the larger history of art by studying the broad, societal, and technological roles of photography.