HAA 1455 Art in the Third Reich: Memorializations of the Holocaust

(offered infrequently)

From their first appearance in the nineteenth century to today, photographic media have often been taken to stand in an uneasy and disruptive relationship towards older forms of picture-making. This course looks at some of the main strands in the discussion that photographic technologies have generated, and strives to understand how these media have been seen to call into question traditional notions of pictorial coherence, authorship, naturalism, and manufacture. Because photography's commentators and practitioners have also emphasized that the discrepancies between it and older forms of image-making are not merely disruptive, but open up new vistas of representational possibility, the class does not confine itself to a narrow definition of photographic media. It treats certain theorizations of cinema along with still photography, above all those theories of film that claim its photographic nature is the key to understanding it. Some of the many thinkers, artists, and critics on whom the class focuses are Charles Baudelaire, Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, Edward Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, Maya Deren, Andre Bazin, and Walter Benjamin.