Comparative History of Ideas Program
University of Washington, Spring Quarter, 2013
Monday/Wednesday, 2:30-4:20pm, Savery 137
Office hours: by appointment in Padelford B101
The medium of photography is almost two centuries old, and yet it is more present in our everyday lives today than ever before. Questions of photographic truth, representation, and power, explored by many thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are thus still crucial to our understanding of the world and our development as scholars, citizens, consumers and advocates for social change.
This course will explore the key ideas and debates concerning the power and politics of photography, through readings, images and students’ own photographic practice. The notion of violence – not only the representation of violent acts, such as war and crime, but the violence of the photographic act itself – will provide a guiding thread for our investigation.