01 TTH4 CAC 12191 WALLACE MU-301
After Illustration: Race, Nation, and Photography Beyond Print
For a very long time now, perhaps since the beginning of fiction and photography, practitioners of the literary and photographic arts alike have held closely to a show-and-not-tell ethic of representation. In this course we will learn to see, by way of some of photography’s most important theorists, what photographs don’t explicitly show or reveal to the naked eye: the cultural logics of historical and contemporary life in the West, both liberatory and repressive. Our focus (!) will be on three significant subjects: the photographic works and writings of Sally Mann, the photographic archive of images of Martin Luther King, Jr., and contemporary visual theory after 9/11. Short works and essays by Walter Benjamin, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Dubois, James Agee, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Fred Moten and Tina Campt will enable us to consider robust new readings of photographic images and their meaning as partners to the literary in the expressive arts. Modest research, three (3) short critical writing exercises (two to three [2-3] pages each), and a seven to eight (7-8) page final paper (excluding images) required.