This seminar examines photography and photographs in three ways: historically, methodologically, and conceptually. Throughout, we investigate the relationship between capitalist accumulation and the photographic image, and ask whether photography might enable us to refuse capitalism's violence — and if so, how?

Historically, the seminar will cover the era of the photographic image, from its invention in the 1830s to the present. We will be especially concerned with examining the role that photography has played in shaping modern understandings of self, nation, and race. In addition to examining relationships between photography, identity, and power, we will develop a set of conceptual and methodological tools for analyzing photographic images, carefully considering the status of photographs as primary sources for historical research. In terms of the conceptual, we will read and discuss foundational works by Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss, and others. Here, we will consider the ethics and politics of human visual experience as such. What does it mean to see and be seen? How has photography been used to separate, identify, and classify? How have photographs changed the kinds of claims that people could make in their respective private and public spheres? Finally, students will consider ways that they might mobilize the visual archive in their own research.