350:606                                                                                                

Index # - 52879

Distribution Requirement:  B

Wednesday – 1:10 p.m.     

MU 207  

Kate Flint

Seminar:  Writing and Photography

This course sets out to ask what is distinctive about writing that engages with photography.   Recent debates about the nature of photography and its relation to the written word have emphasized certain key issues: its connections to reality (and to the development of the realist novel), its associations with memory, the implications of its multiple reproducibility, its illustrative potential, its capacity to normalize or challenge dominant notions concerning gender and race, and its place within autobiography.    We will explore all of these issues.  However, even the best of this work fails to ask, head-on, what is at stake in writing about this particular medium -- about the language that is chosen; about the ways different genres serve to popularize complex theoretical and social debates concerning photography; about the audiences for such writing, and about the interplay of writing with images themselves.     These are questions that we will be posing during the semester, using visual and written examples drawn from two centuries and from a number of different national contexts.

No prior knowledge of the history or practice of photography is expected!   We will start by looking at Walter Benjamin’s “Brief History,” and then look at the language of pioneering photographic practitioners and critics to explore how they negotiate an uneasy passage between language that looks both to the methods and results of experimental science, and also borrows from the magical and transformative effects of lyric poetry.   We will examine the terms in which discussion about the relationship between photography and painting was conducted through analyzing the articles that appeared in Camera Work (1903-17).     Next, we will take up the ways in which imaginative writing has popularized debates about the aesthetic and ethical implications of photography, employing imaginary photographs that both play on readers’ pre-existing associations with the medium, and serve as the means of disseminating and mediating complex conceptual issues concerning photography to a broad audience.   We will explore the connections between such widely-read material (whether two centuries worth of detective fiction, Philip Larkin, or novels on the best-seller list) and the democratic potential of photography itself.     From this, we will move to consider how fiction is used to raise questions about the role of the photographer, concentrating on two areas in particular: that of aesthetic versus exploitation; and the relationship between photography, obsession, involvement and detachment.  Finally, we will explore the interdependency of photography and the written word, looking at the role of photography within autobiography; the provision or omission of captions from exhibitions; documentary photography; the photo-book, and the presence of the written word within actual photographs – in, for example, Brassai’s photographs of graffiti, Clarissa Sligh’s autobiographical series, and Roshini Kempadoo’s interpretations of European immigrant experience.

Texts are likely to include: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida; Marguerite Duras, The Lover; ed. Vicki Goldberg, Photography in Print; Amy Levy, The Romance of a Shop; ed. Jane Rabb, The Short Story and Photography 1880s-1980s; W. S. Sebald, Austerlitz; Susan Sontag, On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others; ed. Liz Wells, The Photography Reader, and a large course packet.