This course examines histories, theories and practices of photography, a medium that has transformed significantly since the daguerrotypes of the mid 19th century. In 1839, Daguerre’s invention was presented as “a free gift to the world.” This course will look at how that gift has been put to use in photographic cultures around the world in contexts as diverse as portrait studios in Yogyakarta, British mothers’ snapshots, drone photography, Soviet family albums and news imagery circulating worldwide. While we will pay careful attention to visual aesthetics, we will focus on photography as a documentary genre, a mode of knowledge deeply embedded in practices of how power is exerted. We will also be considering personal photographic archives such as family albums and scrapbooks and asking when private photographs become public representations. One central feature of the course will be learning about how scholars have thought about and through photography and discussing the complications of applying these theories transhistorically and cross-culturally. (Berger, Barthes, Sontag, Sekula, Strassler, Tagg) Topics for discussion include debates around truth in photography and the politics of representation, photography’s relationship to history and changing institutional uses of photography, as well as different photographic cultures and their anthropological and political significance.
About Zeynep Gürsel
Zeynep Devrim Gürsel is a media anthropologist whose scholarship involves both the analysis and production of images. She is the author of Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (University of California Press, 2016), an ethnography of the international photojournalism industry during its digitalization at the beginning of the 21st century, based on fieldwork conducted in the United States, France and Turkey. Set against the Gursel Image Brokers cover 1backdrop of the War on Terror and based on several years of fieldwork conducted at photojournalism’s centers of power, Image Brokers offers an intimate look at newsrooms covering the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan among other global news. At the turn of the 21st century, image brokers—the people who manage the distribution and restriction of news images—found the core technologies of their craft, the status of images, and their own professional standing all changing rapidly with the digitalization of the infrastructures of representation. From corporate sales meetings to wire service desks, newsrooms to photography workshops and festivals, Image Brokers investigates how news images are produced and how worldviews are reproduced in the process.