Curated Guides > Syllabus > History of Photography Syllabus
History of Photography Syllabus
This course examines the history of photography from its invention in 1839 to the present. It addresses technical, artistic, and social underpinnings of this most modern of art forms.
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Collapse AllLouis Daguerre is generally credited with the introduction of photographic practice in 1839. But in fact, artists, scientists, and inventors of various sorts had been striving for centuries—if not millennia—to reproduce images taken directly from nature. How did they do this and how did it finally lead to the singular Daguerreotype? And how did that lead to the reproducible art form we know so well?
An example of Thomas Wedgewood's attempts to make photographic images with light's affect on leather treated with silver nitrate (George Eastman Museum)
- Origins
- Before photography
- Early Photography: Niépce, Talbot, and Muybridge
- Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, View from the Window at Le Gras
- Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, The Artist’s Studio / Still Life with Plaster Casts
- Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Paris Boulevard or View of the Boulevard du Temple
- Early techniques
- The Daguerreotype
- Talbot’s Processes
- The Cyanotype
- Anna Atkins and the cyanotype process
- The Collodion process
- The Albumen Print
- What is the essential difference between Daguerre’s photo practice vs. Talbot’s?
- Which man’s invention became more influential, and why?
- What surprised you most about the labor-intensiveness of producing early photos?
- Would you say that photography at the time leaned more toward the sciences or the arts? Or a bit of both?
- camera obscura
- heliograph
- daguerreotype
- photogenic drawing
- photographic negative
- botanical studies
- calotype
- cyanotype
- wet collodion process
- albumen print
Key Questions
Key Terms
The excitement over the new technology was global and instantaneous, as the masses marveled over all aspects of it, including being able to simply record “the stovepipes.” Popular applications included those in the sciences/astronomy, documentation, travel photography, and, most especially, portraiture. Others sought to distinguish “high” and “low” photography—categories that would haunt the medium for generations.
John Whipple, William Bond, and George Bond, The Moon, No. 37, 1851, daguerreotype made through Great Refractor Equatorial Mount Telescope, Harvard College Observatory, case size 4 ½ x 3 ¼ in (public domain)
- Practical applications
- John Whipple, William Bond, and George Bond, The Moon, No. 37
- Édouard Baldus, Cloister of St. Trophîme, Arles
- David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Newhaven Fishwives
- Augustus Washington, John Brown
- "High art" photography
- Honoré Daumier, Nadar Elevating Photography to the Height of an Art
- Lady Clementina Hawarden, Clementina and Florence Elizabeth Maude
- Julia Margaret Cameron, Mrs. Herbert Duckworth
- How did these women (Cameron & Hawarden) parlay their largely domestic environments into compelling portraits and scenarios?
- Are there specific reasons that 19th-century women might have an easier time breaking into photographic practices and exhibitions rather than those of painting or sculpture?
- What about photography made it so productive to apply to astronomical studies?
- Was Baldus’ personal intervention in documenting the Cloister problematic, given that his job was essentially archival?
- How might the aesthetics of a photograph help to manipulate its documentary content?
- lithograph
- Mission Heliographique
- re-photographing
- social documentary
- Victorian era
- eugenics
- panorama
- magic lantern
Key Questions
Key Terms
War photography was a natural fit for the new medium’s documentary strengths. Roger Fenton has been referred to as the “first” war photographer with his photos of the Crimean War in 1855. Soon to follow were photographs of the American Civil War (1860s), postwar Manifest Destiny images in the U.S., as well as documentation of the colonial aftermath of wars and/or Western invasions of India, Africa, and China.
Roger Fenton, The valley of the shadow of death, 1855, salted paper print, 28 x 36 cm (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)
- War photography
- Roger Fenton photographs of the Crimean War
- Roger Fenton, Landscape with clouds
- Experiences of the U.S. Civil War, an introduction
- Timothy O’Sullivan, A Harvest of Death
- Native Americans, Manifest Destiny, and early American landscape photography
- John Choate, Boarding School Portraits of Tom Torlino
- Timothy O’Sullivan, Ancient Ruins in the Cañon de Chelle
- Carleton Watkins, Eagle Creek, Columbia River
- Peaks and perils: The life of Carleton Watkins
- Solomon Nunes Carvalho, View of a Cheyenne Village
- Colonialism and its impact
- Photography in 19th-century India
- Lang Jingshan and early Chinese photography
- Photographic postcards of West African masquerade
- Queen Liliʻuokalani’s accession photograph
- Marc Ferrez, Slaves at a Coffee Yard in a Farm, Vale do Paraiba, Sao Paulo
- What issues are raised by Roger Fenton having moved cannonballs to produce a more “poetic” image in the Valley of the Shadow of Death?
- Does that intervention by Fenton negate photography’s role of documenting “the truth”?
- Is the O’Sullivan image “Harvest of Death” still shocking today? Have we become numb to violent imagery?
- How was photography integrated with Chinese cultural traditions in the aftermath of the Opium Wars?
- What does “before-and-after” photography imposed upon 19th-century Native Americans tell us about U.S. policy towards Native Americans?
- Crimean War
- photographic van
- salted paper print
- American Civil War
- Battle of Gettysburg
- Manifest Destiny
- colonization
- Chinese Opium Wars
- "before-and-after" portraiture
Key Questions
Key Terms
The split between photography as art and as a scientific tool continued in this period but begins to fray. Eadweard Muybridge developed processes that revealed the visual world in ways never before seen and anticipated cinema, while numerous avant-garde artists were inspired by photography during the early 20th century.
Eastman Kodak Advertisement for the Brownie Camera, c. 1900
- Introduction
- An introduction to photography in the early 20th century
- France
- Francis Galton, eugenics, and photography
- Étienne-Jules Marey, Joinville Soldier Walking
- Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2
- United States
- Eadweard Muybridge, The Horse in Motion
- Eadweard Muybridge, The Attitudes of Animals in Motion
Getty Conversations - Jacob Riis, “Knee-Pants” at Forty-Five Cents a Dozen—A Ludlow Street Sweater’s Shop, from How the Other Half Lives
- 291—Little Galleries of the Photo Secession
- Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage
- Shigemi Uyeda, Reflections on the Oil Ditch
- Francis Bruguière, Light Rhythms
- Canada
- William Notman, Ice Shove, Commissioner Street, Montreal
- What exactly did Muybridge prove by setting up his sequential cameras on that horse racetrack? Was it something that the eye alone could not see?
- What resulting aspects of Muybridge’s experiments influenced the founding of cinema?
- Which established avant-garde artists did Marey influence?
- Who was the target audience for Riis’ “Other Half” photographs?
- Kodak
- art photography
- stereoscopic lenses
- zoopraxiscope
- rotary-disk shutter
- atomized views
- La Nature
- chrono-photography
- Orphism
- "The Other Half"
- tenement
- reform
Key Questions
Key Terms
During the interwar period the Berlin branch of international Dada pioneered photomontage; the Surrealists developed techniques such as solarization and superimposition. And the Bauhaus Master Moholy-Nagy brought in new darkroom experiments, as well as his philosophy of unexpected viewpoints.
Raoul Hausmann, A Bourgeois Precision Brain Incites a World Movement, also known as Dada siegt (Dada Triumphs), 1920, photomontage and collage with watercolor on paper, 33.5 x 27.5 cm (private collection)
- Dada photomontage and Surrealist photography
- Dada Collage
- Raoul Hausmann, Spirit of the Age: Mechanical Head
- Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany
- Surrealist Photography
- Hans Bellmer, The Doll/La Poupée
- Lola Álvarez Bravo, Architectural Anarchy in Mexico City
- German Bauhaus and “New Vision” photography
- László Moholy-Nagy, Photogram
- László Moholy-Nagy, Climbing the Mast
- Umbo, The Roving Reporter
- Lotte Jacobi, Head of a Dancer
- Gertrud Arndt, Self-Portrait with Veil
- August Sander, Portraits
- Alexander Rodchenko, At the Telephone
- Why was Zurich, Switzerland the ideal location for anti-war emigres to gather in 1916, the founding year of Dada?
- How did Dadaist Hannah Höch use recognizable “pop culture” figures to get viewers involved in her more complex montages?
- A favorite motif of Surrealist artists were dolls, largely due to Freud’s claim that they evoked the “uncanny.” When you see these dolls, such as Bellmer’s--or dolls in general--do they make you feel this intense sense of unease?
- Moholy-Nagy’s “New Vision” advocated for new, unexpected photographic views to jar the viewer out of complacency. In which photos in the unit do you see this at work?
- World War I
- photomontage
- Weimar
- photogram
- solarization
- superimposition
- uncanny
- Bauhaus
- New Vision
- Constructivism
Key Questions
Key Terms
This is the golden age of using photography to capture high-stakes “decisive” moments for American documentarians. Camera technology had been liberated through the use of small, hand-held cameras. This flexibility was crucial for photographers of the Great Depression (especially those hired by the Farm Security Administration, or FSA); for the subsequent wartime photographers on the home front; and for the explosion in postwar popularity of magazines like LIFE. Other documentarians marched to the beat of their own drum.
Gelatin silver print (video still: George Eastman Museum)
- Introduction
- The Gelatin Silver Process
- Depression-era photography
- Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare
- Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother
- Walker Evans, Subway Passengers, New York City
- Lotte Jacobi, Albert Einstein
- Photography during and after World War II
- Esther Bubley, Waiting for the Bus at the Memphis Terminal
- Gordon Parks, Off on My Own (Harlem, New York)
- LaToya Ruby Frazier on Gordon Parks’s Red Jackson
- How Photographs of Poverty in the Americas Ignited an International Battle over Propaganda
- Robert Frank and "New Documents" photographers
- An interview with Robert Frank
- Rashid Johnson on Robert Frank’s The Americans
- Garry Winogrand, Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles, 1960
- In what ways does Cartier-Bresson’s Gare St. Lazare demonstrate the “decisive moment?"
- Lange’s Migrant Mother is often spoken of as “iconic.” But what does that actually mean?
- Why did American and Brazilian magazines get into such a heated debate about the Gordon Parks images of poverty in Rio de Janeiro?
- Rashid Johnson chooses one of his favorite Robert Frank images to analyze: the bus window. He talks about progression of white faces to African American faces as highly symbolic, but there are other elements that concurrently speak to divisions. Such as?
- gelatin silver print
- Leica (35 mm cameras)
- contact sheets
- FSA
- OWI
- documentary
- segregation
- The Americans
- Life Magazine
- single lens reflex (SLR)
Key Questions
Key Terms
The 1960s artists were already established in other media, but saw the contemporary relevance and enormous potential of integrating photographs into their work. Fashion photographers also found themselves earning newfound respect as artists, and color photography began to assert itself as an art form.
Robert Rauschenberg, Retroactive I, 1963, oil and silkscreen-ink print on canvas, 213.4 x 152.4 cm (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art) All works © Robert Rauschenberg
- Neo-Dada and Pop
- Homage to JFK: Rauschenberg’s Retroactive I
- Robert Rauschenberg, Signs
- Pop Art
- Richard Hamilton, Just What is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?
- Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans
- Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych
- Betye Saar, Liberation of Aunt Jemima
- Portraiture
- Richard Avedon, Audrey Hepburn, New York, January 1967
- Diane Arbus, A Box of Ten Photographs
- Color photography
- Color Photography
- Harold Edgerton, Milk-Drop Coronet Splash
- Richard Misrach, Border Cantos
- Why did Warhol’s work raise questions about whether it was “real” art? Do you think that has more to do with his subject matter or his process?
- Most people assume that Pop Art was founded in the U.S., but its roots are actually in the UK. What group is given credit for founding it? What process—born in the 1920s—was essential to its founding?
- Why do you think fashion photography had such a hard time being taken seriously as artistic practice? And why did Diane Arbus reject fashion photography?
- Why were museums biased against color photography, to the point where there was no single-artist show of it at MoMA until the 1970s?
- photography-in-art
- Independent Group (UK)
- pop art
- silkscreen
- assemblage
- editorial
- color photography
- eccentrics
Key Questions
Key Terms
Minimalism, usually considered a sculptural movement, also held sway over key photographers. Conceptualism, devoted to multi-media practices, innovated in various areas including the introduction of text into pieces: i.e. an insistence that the viewer become part of making the work through thought processes.
Tom Marioni, My First Car, 1972, De Saisset Gallery, Santa Clara, California (photo from Performance Anthology: Source Book of California Performance Art, eds. Carl E. Loeffler and Darlene Tong)
- Conceptual practice
- Conceptual Art: An Introduction
- Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs
- Nicolás García Uriburu, Coloration of the Grand Canal, Venice
- Vito Acconci, Following Piece
- Martha Rosler, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems
- Harry Gamboa Jr., À la Mode, from the Asco era
- Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii
- Minimalism
- An introduction to Minimalism
- New Topographics
- Bernd and Hilla Becher, Water Towers, 1988
- Eleanor Antin, Carving: A Traditional Sculpture
- Minimalism is generally known as a sculptural movement, so how does photography fit in with its ethos?
- Conceptualism initially seems like a very general term: how does this methodology dovetail with photographic practice?
- What were some of the key practices integral to introducing video art into acceptance in the art world?
- The essay on New Topographics discusses how the 1975 Eastman House show was initially under-appreciated but has wielded enormous influence since, both in content and manner of installation. How so?
- Describe examples of how photography became essential to Conceptualism by documenting ephemeral/fleeting displays and performances.
- grids
- topographics
- suburbia
- performance art
- feminism
- site-specific
- media technologies
- Fluxus
- TV as a Creative Medium
- TV Garden
- Chicano Art Movement
- mail art
Key Questions
Key Terms
This unit likewise contains an exhibition that became essential to defining a movement: “Pictures” (1977) recognized a new generation of photographers that appropriated images/practices directly from the overwhelming specter of mass media. Concurrently we have the Culture Wars of the 1980s, where there was increasing emphasis on sexuality and the AIDS crisis, causing political backlash.
Left: Walker Evans, Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife, 1936, gelatin silver print, 20.9 x 14.4 cm, (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); right: Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans, gelatin silver print, 12.8 x 9.8 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
- Pictures Generation
- The Pictures Generation
- Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21
- Cindy Sherman, Untitled #228
- Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face)
- Culture Wars
- Andres Serrano, Piss Christ
- Sally Mann, Blowing Bubbles
- Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Woman Feeding Bird), from The Kitchen Table Series
- Joel Sternfeld, On This Site—The Stonewall Inn
- Again we see how exhibitions are key to synthesizing the goals of a movement that doesn’t yet know it’s a movement! How does Douglas Crimp’s “Pictures Generation” show accomplish this?
- What are specific ways in which Cindy Sherman plugs into default knowledge of mass culture imagery: from TV, ads, and gendered tropes?
- What were the practical repercussions of the 1980s Culture Wars? For example, how severely were art budgets slashed by conservative Republicans at the time?
- Sally Mann’s photographs of children, including her own, prompted accusations of sexual exploitation by religious and conservative groups. She thought nothing of showing her children playing half-clothed, seeing this as a normal part of childhood. How does the public and commercial aspect of her work inform this issue?
- In what ways is it a legitimate art-making project to rephotograph existing photography?
- "Pictures"
- postmodern
- gendered act
- male gaze
- Ways of Seeing
- patriarchy
- Culture Wars
- NEA
Key Questions
Key Terms
The intensified political activism shown by AIDS-related imagery also encompassed a rejection of the South African Apartheid system, leading to some of the most consequential documentarians of the later 20th century. Concurrently, previously overlooked masters in western Africa have come to define more affirmative messages of the post-colonial middle-class.
David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (One Day This Kid...), 1990, photostat, sheet: 75.7 × 101.9 × 0.5 cm (Whitney Museum of American Art) © The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York
- AIDS activism in the U.S.
- David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (One Day This Kid . . .)
- Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (billboard of an empty bed)
- Sue Coe, Aids won’t wait, the enemy is here not in Kuwait
- Documenting Apartheid in South Africa
- The story of Ernest Cole, a black photographer in South Africa during apartheid
- Santu Mofokeng, Train Churches
- Figures & Fictions: Santu Mofokeng
- Sue Williamson, For Thirty Years Next to His Heart
- Portraiture in Mali and Senegal
- Malick Sidibé, Nuit de Noël (Happy Couple)
- Malick Sidibé, Vues de dos
- Seydou Keïta, Untitled (Seated Woman with Chevron Print Dress)
- Omar Victor Diop: Black subjects in the frame
- Why did Gonzales-Torres co-opt the public space of New York City billboards to memorialize the AIDS crisis?
- Ernest Cole managed entry into racial spaces to which Apartheid policies tried to prevent access. How did his searing documentation of South Africa at the time benefit from this strategy?
- Malian photographers Keïta and Sidibé worked against what has been called “Afropessimism” to celebrate the middle class enjoying themselves and enjoying being photographed. How do these images work against negative stereotypes attached to “African” photography?
- LGBTQ+
- AIDS
- Act up!
- Apartheid
- townships
- Afrikaans
- Bamako
- post-independence era
Key Questions
Key Terms
In the 1990s, photographic practice starts to go big: really big. Photographers overtly embraced large-scale images and screens as part of the process: this was sometimes in the form of enormous photographs, or projections, or combinations of videos/photos in large-scale installations. This unit will also address explorations of identity around the globe.
Jeff Wall, A View from an Apartment, 2004–05, transparency on lightbox, 1670 x 2440 mm © Jeff Wall, used by permission of the artist, special thanks to Sandy Heller, The Heller Group, LLC (Tate, London)
- Ambition in scale
- Jeff Wall, A View from an Apartment
- Rineke Dijkstra, Odessa, Ukraine, August 4, 1993
- Stan Douglas, Every Building on 100 West Hastings
- Trevor Paglen, The Black Sites—The Salt Pit, Northeast of Kabul, Afghanistan
- Lorna Simpson – ‘Everything I Do Comes from the Same Desire’
- Catherine Opie, Self-Portrait/Cutting
- Identity and place
- Alfredo Jaar, A Logo for America
- Muriel Hasbun, Todos los santos (Volcán de Izalco, amén)
- Christina Fernandez, María’s Great Expedition
- Shirin Neshat, Rebellious Silence, Women of Allah series
- Shirin Neshat, ‘Dreams Are Where Our Fears Live’
- Hai Bo, Untitled No. 36
- Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn
- Photography in the 1990s absorbed cinematic influences, both in sheer size of image, but also in its staging, lighting, etc. Where can you see these filmic aspects used?
- In the essay on Stan Douglas, his influences for “Every Building” are outlined. Can you name the influential artist most responsible for the conceptual layout of the Douglas piece?
- How does Trevor Paglen specifically interrogate documentary photography’s ability to convey deeper truths, beyond external descriptive elements?
- Where is the art located in Ai Wei Wei’s Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn? Is it in the act of destruction? In the documentation of it? Or in the ideas it raises about China’s cultural patrimony?
- How did Murial Hasbun use the iconography of the volcano to express her heritage and the contemporary politics of El Salvador?
- cinematic
- transparencies
- Spectacolor
- Black Sites
- multiculturalism
- Islamic Revolution
- multimedia
- photo-text
- cultural heritage
Key Questions
Key Terms
Globalism now emerges as a driving photographic force. The pressing issues of the 21st century demand it: migration, the U.S. War on Terror, border strife, and the struggle over monuments of the past all have a prominent place in these works, and the international tensions that continue to this day.
Zineb Sedira, Mother Tongue, 3 screens installation, 5 minutes each (Brooklyn Museum) © Zineb Sedira
- Public memory
- Zineb Sedira – ‘The Personal is Political’
- Krzysztof Wodiczko, Monument
- Birdhead—“We Photograph Things That Are Meaningful To Us”
- Will Wilson, Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange
- An interview with Alfredo Jaar
- Politics of place
- Yto Barrada, Ceuta Border, Illegally Crossing the Border into the Spanish Enclave of Ceuta, Tangier
- An-My Lê, 29 Palms
- Pocho Research Society (Sandra de la Loza), Echoes en el Echo: A Series of Interventions about Memory, Place, and Gentrification
- Graciela Iturbide, Photographing Mexico
- Catherine Opie, Figure and Landscape series
- Annie Leibovitz, Queen Elizabeth II
- Genesis Báez, Crossing Time
- Do the works that face issues of migration head-on—such as Barrada’s—still seem applicable to the current state of this incendiary global issue?
- Gentrification is another oft-discussed issue in today’s world. What do you think of the Pocho Research Society’s solution of surreptitiously placing plaques to excavate former uses of buildings? Can you think of alternative ways to pay homage to the past?
- Opie continues her deep engagement in the practice of gender identification in her series: why, specifically, does this esteemed portraitist-landscapist choose high school football teams to document?
- gentrification
- migration
- social mobility
- collective consciousness
- cultural identity
- snapshot-style
- social injustice
- Indigenous
- elegy
Key Questions
Key Terms
Where is photography now, and where is it going? Some artists now seem far-removed from Daguerre’s original project of recording the outside world. Others use video. But all are profoundly affected by the interconnections created by our global reliance on the internet.
Digital Photography (video still: George Eastman Museum)
- Digital Photography
- Bill Viola, The Crossing
- Art, Race, and the Internet: Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Black.Net.Art Actions
- Cao Fei, Building “RMB City”
- An interview with Jamian Juliano-Villani
- Meriem Bennani’s Exploded Visions
- Shahzia Sikander, The Last Post
- Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Border Tuner
- Yee I-Lann, Picturing Power #6…
- The man who created the first digital camera worked for which company?
- In the “digital photography” video, one of the curators states that the relationship between memory and photography has now changed due to digital—i.e., non “object” photos. Do you agree? And is that nostalgic loss a problematic one?
- What do you think of Viola’s attempt to merge ancient spirituality and video art? Does that seem contradictory, highly innovative, both, neither?
- What does Juliano-Villani mean by “field-work” in her artistic practice?
- In what ways does animation retain linkages to photography, if any?
- magnetic tape
- multi-channel video installations
- immersive installation
- in-situ
- iconography
- methodology
