ARTH 1164

FWS: Looking through Smoke: Photography and Visibility

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2025-2026 Catalog.

We think that photographs show us a perfect re-creation of the world around us, but photographs are imperfect slices of reality. Historically, what kinds of people, places, and phenomena were photographs unable to capture? What lurks just outside of or beyond the edge of the frame? This course will ask students to consider the politics of making photographs and rendering certain subjects visible (or invisible). Throughout the course, we will examine photographs from the nineteenth century to the present and read texts by art historians, cultural critics, and creative writers that present different ways of seeing and interpreting photographs. Students will develop two kinds of writing in this course—formal analyses of photographs through close-looking and persuasive, well-researched essays based on analyses of scholarly texts.

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