ARTH 231 - African American Photography

Crosslisted With AFCA 231
FDR: Fine Arts (HA)
Credits: 3

In this course we will study the politics of representation (and the relationship between the image and ideology) in African American photography from the 1840s to the present. Aesthetics, gender, class, the impact of slavery, lynching, colonialism, neocolonialism, and globalization on the arts, as well as issues of memory, identity, subjectivity, historical “truth,” and race, will be explored in relation to African American photographers. We will consider the production, distribution, consumption, and archiving of these visual texts, as well as the materiality and mass replication of the photographic artifact, and examine various genres of visual texts, from the social documentary to portraiture to art photography. As we analyze the photography of Jules Lion, A.P. Bedou, Louis Agasisz, James VanDerZee, Gordan Parks, Carrie Mae Weems, and Latoya Ruby Frazier, among others, we will consider to what extent photographs comment upon or subvert racial identities and social hierarchies, what role the camera plays in protest movements, and whether one, as Audre Lorde asks, can ever dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.