The Politics of Photography (Chicago)

For many revolutionary artists in the early 20th century, photography was the medium with the most political potential. Photography is cheaply reproducible, can be disseminated broadly, keeps pace with industrialization, and its representation of modern life is readily legible to a broad audience. For these reasons, Soviet artist Aleksandr Rodchenko proposed photography as the medium by which to shift our relationship with the broader world, writing in 1928: “We who are accustomed to seeing the usual, the accepted, must reveal the world of sight. We must revolutionize our visual reasoning.”

This course takes up the idea of photography as a political tool, surveying the work of photojournalists, propagandists, and artists across the history of photography. We will begin with the most photographed American of the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass, who advocated for photography as a supplementary method to dismantle racist society. Our examination of the political valences of photography will bring us through the experimental methods of modernist photographers, including John Heartfield’s anti-fascist montages and Gustav Klutsis’s political posters, all the way up to the digital age with contemporary popular protest photography and Trevor Paglen’s excoriations of Artificial Intelligence. Together, we will consider the arguments of theorists like Walter Benjamin, Stuart Hall, Zahid Chaudhary, and Jo Spence, among others, to address questions like: What is the political value of representation? Should radical art be visually demanding or would that be exclusionary? Does photography’s endless reproduction desensitize audiences? How can photography encourage direct action? And what might Marxist photography look like?

Course Schedule

$335.00

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