Photography Theory and American Media Cultures

In his -Little History of Photography,” Walter Benjamin states: -The illiteracy of the future […] will be ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography.” This course will introduce you to some major texts of photography theory (including Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Alan Trachtenberg, and W. J. T. Mitchell) in order to investigate what makes a photograph a photograph and how photography works. Our aim will be to read photography more critically and make better sense of an environment increasingly determined by photographic images and their multifold interpretations. Accordingly, we will discuss central topics such as credibility and the invention of reality, the power and violence of imagery, the politics and experience of identity (racial, class-based, sexual, national), social photography and photojournalism, documentary evidence vs. art performance, the creation of space, mass culture and everyday life, the photographic gaze and voyeurism, subjectivity and memory, and agency and autonomy. Throughout, we will analyze, test, and challenge our findings in light of a variety of examples from US media cultures (incl. film, documentary, literature, non-fiction, and autobiography), which put photography theory into practice, either by thematizing photographs and the photographic process or by using the medium of photography for formal innovation. Examples may range from Jacob A. Riis’s photojournalistic work How the Other Half Lives through Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Rear Window and Hiroshi Sugimoto’s images of drive-in cinemas to Don DeLillo’s novel Mao II. Anglistik - Amerikanistik Universität Siegen SoSe 2012 Dr. Faisst Julia