PHOTO 2183

This seminar will explore some of the inherent violence(s) of differing forms of representation, as well as an array of images that contend with the representation of violence, in order to better grasp some of the powerful interacting phenomena at work in our contemporary experience of social, political, sexual, racial and economic difference. This will be our task: to develop means of better grasping how both images and ideas act on us in the perpetuation and the normalization of forms of violent differentiation, and to reckon with how those self-same images and ideas might simultaneously offer means of resistance. Students will read, respond verbally in open discussion, write an essay, prepare slide presentations to deliver to class, produce an annotated bibliography and generate visual work in response to assignments in class.

We will attend to the tacit and yet essential violences that operate at the level of our conceptualization of the photographic image, as well as of the human body, in terms of its gendered expression, its sexual identity, its race, its alterity and its abjection. This work will be informed by a combination of close readings of photographic theory, but equally by trenchant political critiques of culture, and new strains of film criticism. Working outward from readings of Roland Barthes and Tina Campt, we will explore the photographic archive, and the question of whether we can bring new modes of attention to our encounters with photographic images—modes of attention that are attuned to our embodied experience of seeing and listening, and that draw on an interdisciplinary understanding of the various forces with which the photographic image is charged. We will assess the various ways in which representations of the black body—and new conceptualizations of blackness itself—free us up to perceive unstated but ongoing forms of violence and of resistance, both in representation and in the history on which images of blackness depend.

Through a reading of Afropessimist critiques of recent cinema, we will examine profoundly powerful forms of symbolic violence, opening on to a process of questioning the structural position of the black female figure, both in film and in our cultural imaginary. Working through iconic images of torture and of death, we will examine the fragile and mutable symbol of the American national body, exploring its adaptability to a process of queering, and its ongoing resistance to transformation by race. We will also examine the ways in which the refusal to represent might act as a means to embody and approximate the depth of trauma at work in genocide, debating the relative merits of withholding images as against displaying them. This will lead us back to Barthes and Campt at the semester’s end. This seminar depends upon a willingness to regularly view controversial and emotive imagery, and an equal commitment to free, responsive and principled debate. It is my hope that we will fail together often and unselfconsciously, and that we will grapple frankly with the complex relays of power that divide us, while they are held up for us to see within and beyond the reproducible image.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $25.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. This course is a requirement for Sophomore Photography students.

Major Requirement | BFA Photography