Photography in the Archives: Issues for Nineteenth-Century Photography

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7

The photographer and critic Allan Sekula suggested that photography was always caught in a sort of limbo between the chattering ghosts of bourgeois art and bourgeois science. This module explores some key constitutive concepts that emerge from this strange location.

The module is intended to introduce central ideas for the study of photography. It is not a methodology course, but addresses problems that cut across the current approaches to the field. While the module does not take an exclusive theoretical approach, the issues may be said to constitute 'historical epistemology' and they all tackle issues that may be taken for granted, such as 'objectivity', 'evidence' or 'documents'. The aim is to track the development of these core ideas in photography through a process of historical development.

Each class takes a specific topic for discussion and is organised around set readings. Teaching is not period specific, but it has historical emphasis on the 19th century.

Indicative module content

• Origin stories
• Art and science
• Objectivity
• Authorship
• Affect
• The nature of the document
• Evidence
• Archives
• The figured and the proper
• The performative image

By the end of this module, you should have:

• acuity in observing visual culture including photography
• an enhanced understanding of this visual culture within the social and cultural context of its production
• knowledge of methodologies concerned with the discipline
• engaged constructively in current debates concerning the discipline and its changing nature
• the ability to select and acquire relevant visual and textual material and evidence and to analyse, present and interpret this as appropriate within the context of the module
• developed appropriate historical and theoretical methodological frameworks and approaches (including those relevant to photography, where applicable).