Course duration:
7 lessons | 14 hours
Course Summary
The course regards photography as a series of practices, as different forms of experience rather than accepting a strict essentialist definition (art, medium, technology etc.). Thus, it follows various cultural, political, psychological, symbolical and other functions and uses of photography. Tracing its cultural history and the part photography plays in the complex media context the course focuses on the politics of the image and the reinvention of the self in the photographic experience. Other important topics of discussion are the relation between photography and truth, the mass consumption of images and its effects, the ethics of seeing (photography and journalism), digital media and post-photography. The various subjects refer to visual examples in the form of series of thematic photographies that will be object of debate during the talks at the course.
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- Technological Reproduction and Mass Consumption of Images. “The Image-choked World”. Photography in the Age of Narcissism: The Photographic Mirror. Self-Invention, Avatar Identities and Strategies of Survival. The World after Photography: „A Brothel without Walls”. The Transparent Society. Surveillance and Incrimination. Peeping, Stalking, Exposing. The End of Privacy.
- Photographs
- Books – Picturing ourselves & The Culture of Narcissism and the Minimal Self (Christopher Lasch)
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- The Politics of Image II: The Society of the Spectacle and the Autonomous Image. A Sociology of the Image: Photography as a Practice. A Middle-Brow Art Between the Vulgar and “High” Practices. The Reversed Aesthetics. Digital Media and the End of Photography. The Post-photographic Era.
- Photographs
- Books
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Bibliography
