CIAS Summer School 2012

Workshop: On Photography

Instructor: Liam Kennedy, liam.kennedy@ucd.ie

The history of photography in the United States is intricately tied up with the histories

of state formation and national identity. Since the mid-nineteenth century, photography

has both mirrored and shaped relations between liberalism and democracy, between

 public and private spheres, between domestic and foreign affairs, and between the

individual and the state. In the twenty-first century it continues to map these relations,

critically and symptomatically, at a time of crisis for paradigms of the nation-state and

of liberal capitalism. In this workshop we will examine some of the ways in which

 photography functions to mediate the workings of power and formations of identity in

national and transnational contexts. We will also consider some of the aesthetic,

affective and ethical issues surrounding ‘photographic seeing’ and the evidentiary status

of the photographic image.

 Note: Those readings not available online will be available as PDF files (marked PDF

 below). On Monday the first half of the session will be a general introduction, the

second half will focus on the set readings. In the Tuesday-Friday sessions the first half 

will focus on the set readings, the second half on presentations. The schedule for 

 presentations will be distributed before the workshop.

Monday: On Photography

Susan Sontag, ‘In Plato’s Cave’, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1977)

Gillian Rose, ‘Introduction’, Visual Methodologies (London: Sage, 2007) [PDF]

Sara Blair, ‘The Photograph’s Last Word: Visual Culture Studies Now’, American

 Literary History 22,3 (Fall 2010)

 

Tuesday: Race and (Post)Colonial Frames

Deborah Poole, ‘Introduction’, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the

 Andean Image World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) [PDF]

Mark Rice, ‘Colonial Photography Across Empires and Islands’,  Journal of 

Transnational American Studies 3,2 (2011),

http://escholarship.org/uc/item/8fz4t188#page-1

 

Anna Pegler-Gordon, ‘Chinese Exclusion, Photography and the Development of U.S

Immigation Policy’, American Quarterly 58,1 (March 2006), 51-77

David Campbell, ‘Salgado & the Sahel: Documentary Photography and the Imaging of 

Famine”, in Rituals of Mediation: International Politics & Social Meaning , eds.

Francois Debrix & Cynthia Weber (University of Minnesota Press, 2003)

http://www.david-campbell.org/wp-content/documents/Salgado_and_Sahel.pdf 

Wednesday: Place, Space and Landscape

Rebecca Solnit, ‘Unsettling the West: Contemporary American Landscape

Photography’, ‘Look the Other Way: New Western Landscapes’, in  As Eve Said to the

Serpent (University of Georgia Press, 2001), 90-108,

http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~cses/csessite/restricted/EreadDocs/solnit_eve.pdf 

Timothy Davis, ‘Beyond the Sacred and the Profane: Cultural landscape Photography

in America, 1930-1990’, in Mapping American Culture, eds., Wayne Franklin and

Michael Steiner (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 191-230 [PDF]

Miles Orvell, ‘Photography and Society’, American Photography (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2003), 105-140 [PDF]

Eric J. Sandeen, ‘Souvenirs from the Landscapes of Modernity: Richard Misrach,

Camilo Vergara and the Visual Politics of Ruin’, in in Pictorial Cultures and Political 

 Iconographies, eds. Udo Hebel and Christoph Wagner (Berlin: deGruyter, 2011), 315-

34 [PDF]

Thursday: War, Violence, and Suffering

Robert Hariman, ‘Watching War Evolve’, in The Violence of the Image: Photography

and International Conflict , eds. Liam Kennedy and Caitlin Patrick (London: I.B.

Tauris, 2013) [PDF]

Wendy Kozol, ‘Witnessing Precarity: Photojournalism, Women’s/Human Rights, and

the War in Afghanistan’, in The Violence of the Image: Photography and International 

Conflict , eds. Liam Kennedy and Caitlin Patrick (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013) [PDF]

Liam Kennedy, ‘Seeing and Believing: On Photography and the War on Terror’,  Public

Culture (June 2012) [PDF]

Friday: Globalization

Liam Kennedy, ‘Magnum’s Global Enterprise’, in The Magnum Collection: A Visual 

 Archive of the Modern World , ed. Steven Hoelscher (University of Texas Press, 2012)

[PDF]

Zanny Begg, ‘Recasting Subjectivity: Globalisation and the Photography of Andreas

 

Gursky and Allan Sekula’, Third Text 19, 6 (2005), 625-36,

http://www.zannybegg.com/CTTE_A_138147[1].pdf 

Miles Orvell, ‘Conclusion: Post-Photography’, American Photography (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2003), 205-16 [PDF]