This course provides students with an overview on the history of photography, its social functions and its role within the wider history of the technically reproduced image. The course discusses its relations with painting and visual arts and connections with the visual devices of contemporaneity: cinema, TV, video, internet, including digital photography.
Curriculum
teacher profile teaching materials
The syllabus with the final course program will be made available around the start of the course itself.
Collection of essays selected by the professor.
Programme
The course examines the history of photography from its origins to today, considering photography as both a medium of artistic expression and as a social practice. We will analyze the Nineteenth-century origins of the medium, its ever more pervasive dissemination in all the spheres of everyday life, and the main technological metamorphoses that have shaped its development, up to the digital transition and the current employment in the online context. With the support of the writings of some of the foremost scholars of the medium (i.e. Roland Barthes, as well as Susan Sontag, Georges Didi-Huberman and others), we will reflect on some of the most important photographic artists (from Talbot to Nadar, from Alfred Stieglitz to Henri Cartier-Bresson, from Berenice Abbott to Luigi Ghirri), on the elements that grant photography its expressive force, and on the kind of involvement these images may elicit.The syllabus with the final course program will be made available around the start of the course itself.
Core Documentation
Roland Barthes, "Camera Lucida", Hill & Wang, New York, 1980.Collection of essays selected by the professor.
Attendance
In person classes, attendance not mandatory, but strongly recommended.Type of evaluation
The student will be evalued through a written exam, consisting of open-ended questions. The language of the exam will be Italian. Exceptionally, Erasmus students may take the test in English.