This page contains photo and movie assignments for each class session. Full citations for all photo sources are listed below.
| WEEK # | TOPICS | VIEWING |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction |
"A Day in the New York Times." Selections from The New York Times, December 30, 2007. (PDF) "Very Brief History of Photographic Technology." (PDF - 9.3MB) |
| 2 | The power and ambiguity of photography |
"Schools and Phases in Photographic Art." (PDF - 9.3MB) Selections from The Photographer's Eye. ( |
| 3 | Looking at faces |
"The Afghan Girl." (PDF) "19th Century Portraits and Society." Selections from Beautiful and Damned. ( "20th Century Portrait Photography." Selections from Theatre of the Face. (PDF) "Physiognomy." Selections from New Physiognomy. ( "Faces and Expressions: the Criminal and Insane." Selections from Beautiful and the Damned and Beauty of Another Order. ( "August Sander, German Portraits." Selections from Men Without Masks. (PDF) |
| 4 | Snaps/albums/postcards/ itinerants, everyday photography and people's lives |
"American Snapshots." Selections from Art of the American Snapshot. (PDF) "American Postcards." Selections from Real Photo Postcard Guide. ( "French Family Snapshots as Art." Selections from The Boyhood Photographs of J. H. Lartigue. ( "Royal Snaps." Selections from Queen Alexandra's Christmas Gift Book and p. 548 in Lenman, Oxford Companion. ( "A Professor's Family Pictures." Selections from Prof. Howe's personal collection. (Images unavailable.) "A Lebanese Portrait Studio." Selections from Hashem El Madani and Mapping Sitting. (PDF) "Guatemalan Itinerant Photographers." Selections from Los Ambulantes. (PDF) "Memento Mori: Recording the Dead." Selections from Forget Me Not. ( "Jewish Memorial Books." Selections from From a Ruined Garden. (PDF) Movie: "Photo Wallahs." David and Judith McDougall, 1992. |
| 5 | Truth and deception |
"Spirit Photography." pp. 20-23, 29-34, 73-78, and 92-94 in The Perfect Medium and p. 308 in Houdini. ( "Disappearing Commissars." Selections from The Commissar Vanishes. Movie: "Telegrams from the Dead." Directed by Rocky Collins. The American Experience. PBS, 1994. |
| 6 | Advertising photography and gender |
"Gender in Advertising." Selections from Gender Advertisements. (PDF) "Fashion Photography." Selections from Elle, February 2007. (Images unavailable.) |
| 7 | Photographing the Great Depression |
"Documenting the Depression." Selections from Documenting America. ( Selections from Roll Jordan Roll. (PDF) Selections from You Have Seen Their Faces. (PDF) Selections from An American Exodus. ( Selections from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. ( Selections from Land of the Free. ( Selections from Fruit Tramps. (PDF) |
| 8 | Imperialism and photography |
"Pictures from the National Geographic." Selections from issues from the 1930s, 1950s, and the modern day. (PDF) Selections from Martín Chambi. (PDF) Selections from The Vanishing Race. ( Selections from Last of the Nuba. (PDF) |
| 9 | Muck-raking, advocacy, and propaganda |
"Muckraking." ( "Slaves and Prisons." Selections from "Africa's Children: Struggles of Youth." New York Times, October 29, 2006. Selections from Death in the Making. (PDF) "Environmental Propaganda." Selections from This is the American Earth and The Hand of Man on America. (PDF) Selections from House of Bondage. (PDF) "Minamata." Selections from Minamata. (PDF) Selections from Living with the Enemy. (PDF) "Genocide in Paraguay?" Selections from The Indian Peoples of Paraguay. (PDF) "Sebastião Salgado." Selections from An Uncertain Grace. (PDF) "Death Camp Guards Have Fun." Selections from Wilkinson, Alec. "Picturing Auschwitz." New Yorker, March 17, 2008. (PDF) Movie: "The Other Half Revisited." Pacific Street Films, 1998. |
| 10 | Photographing people's lives: photo-essays and photo-ethnography |
"Trobriand Islanders." Selections from Malinowski's Kiriwina. ( Selections from Balinese Character. (PDF) "The Grand Valley Dani." Selections from Gardens of War and New Guinea Photographs, 1961. (PDF) Selections from The Edge of the Forest. (PDF) "Mourning in Greece." Selections from The Death Rituals of Rural Greece. (PDF) "Weaving in Chiapas." Selections from Weaving Generations Together. (PDF) "Indigenous Photography: Corn." Selections from Ixim; Maíz; Corn. (PDF) Selections from My Little Sister Cristina. (PDF) "Preparing a Photo-ethnography." Selections from Prof. Howe's collection. (Images unavailable.) Selections from "Pamplona Bullfight." (PDF) Selections from "A Country Doctor." (PDF) Selections from "Spanish Village." (PDF) |
| 11 | Looking at pictures, thinking about photography | "Photo-manipulation." (PDF) (Used with permission.) |
| 12 | War and suffering in the picture | Movie: "War Photographer." Directed by Christian Frei. 2001. |
Photo Sources
Adams, Ansel, and Nancy Newhall. This is the American Earth. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club, 1960.
Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: the American Classic, in Words and Pictures, of Three Tenant Families in the Deep South. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. ISBN: 9780395957714.
Alexandra of Denmark. Queen Alexandra's Christmas Gift Book. London, England: The Daily Telegraph, 1908.
Bassil, Karl, Zeina Maasri, Akram Za'atari, and Walid Radd. Mapping Sitting: On Portraiture and Photography. London, England: Mind the Gap/Arab Image Foundation, 2005. ISBN: 9789953004129.
Batchen, Geoffrey. Forget Me Not: Photography & Remembrance. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004. ISBN: 9781568984506.
Bateson, Gregory, and Margaret Mead. Balinese Character. New York, NY: New York Academy of Sciences, 1942.
Bogdan, Robert, and Todd Weseloh. Real Photo Postcard Guide: the People's Photography. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006. ISBN: 9780815608516.
Boot, Chris. Magnum Stories. New York, NY: Phaidon, 2004. ISBN: 9780714842455.
Caldwell, Erskine, and Margaret Bourke-White. You Have Seen Their Faces. Atlanta, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1995. ISBN: 9780820316925.
Capa, Robert. Death in the Making. New York, NY: Civici-Friede, 1938.
Chambi, Martín. Martín Chambi, Photographs 1920-1950. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1993. ISBN: 9781560982449.
Chéroux, Clement, et al. The Perfect Medium. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780300111361.
Cole, Ernest. House of Bondage. New York, NY: Random House, 1967.
Danforth, Loring, and Alexander Tsiaris. The Death Rituals of Rural Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982. ISBN: 9780691000275.
Davidson, Bruce. Portraits. New York, NY: Aperture, 2005. ISBN: 9780893818517.
Emmet, Herman. Fruit Tramps: A Family of Migrant Farmworkers. Albuquerque, NM: University Of New Mexico Press, 1989. ISBN: 9780826311191.
Ferrato, Donna. Living with the Enemy. New York, NY: Aperture, 2005. ISBN: 9780893814809.
Fleischauer, Carl, and Beverly Brannan. Documenting America, 1935-1943. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988. ISBN: 9780520062214.
Gardner, Robert, and Karl Heider. Gardens of War: Life and Death in the New Guinea Stone Age. New York, NY: Random House, 1968.
Goffman, Erving. Gender Advertisements. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. ISBN: 9780674341913.
Greenfield, Patricia Marks. Weaving Generations Together: Evolving Creativity in the Maya of Chiapas. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2004. ISBN: 9781930618282.
Greenough, Sarah, et al. The Art of the American Photograph, 1888-1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. ISBN: 9780691133683.
Guzmán Meza, Emiliano. Ixim; Maíz; Corn. Chiapas, Mexico: CIESAS, 2004. ISBN: 9789684964884.
Hamilton, Peter, and Roger Hargreaves. Beautiful and the Damned: The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Photography. Burlington, VT: Lund Humphries, 2001. ISBN: 9780853318217.
Kayser, Alex. Heads. New York, NY: Abbeville Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780896595248.
King, David. The Commissar Vanishes. New York, NY: Metropolitan, 1997. ISBN: 9780805052947.
Kozloff, Max. The Theatre of the Face: Portrait Photography Since 1900. New York, NY: Phaidon, 2007. ISBN: 9780714843728.
Kugelmass, Jack, and Jonathan Boyarin. From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998. ISBN: 9780253211873.
Lange, Dorothea, and Paul Taylor. An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969.
Lartigue, J. H. Boyhood Photographs of J. H. Lartigue: The Family Album of a Gilded Age. Lausanne, Switzerland: Guichard, 1966. ISBN: 9780106613618.
Lenman, Robin. The Oxford Companion to the Photograph. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780198662716.
Lopez Diaz, Xunka'. Mi hermanita Cristina, una niña chamula / My little sister Cristina, a chamula girl. Mexico City, Mexico: CIESAS, 2000.
Lyman, Christopher. The Vanishing Race, and Other Illusions: Photographs of Indians by Edward S. Curtis. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1982. ISBN: 9780394710297.
MacLeish, Archibald. Land of the Free. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1938.
Maybury-Lewis, David, and James Howe. The Indian Peoples of Paraguay: Their Plight and Their Prospects. Cambridge, MA: Cultural Survival Special Report #2, 1980.
Parker, Ann, and Avon Neal. Los Ambulantes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982. ISBN: 9780262160865.
Penn, Irving. Passage: A Work Record. New York, NY: Knopf, 1991. ISBN: 9780679404910.
Peterkin, Julia, and Doris Ulmann. Roll, Jordan, Roll. New York, NY: Ballou, 1933.
Plowden, David. The Hand of Man on America. New York, NY: Dodd, Mead, 1973. ISBN: 9780856990779.
Reinhardt, Mark, et al. Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. ISBN: 9780226709505.
Riefenstahl, Leni. The Last of the Nuba. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1995. ISBN: 9780312136420.
Rockefeller, Michael, and Kevin Bubriski. Michael Rockefeller: New Guinea Photographs, 1961. Salem, MA: Peabody Essex Museum, 2007. ISBN: 9780873658065.
Salgado, Sebastião. An Uncertain Grace. New York, NY: Aperture, 2005. ISBN: 9780893814212.
Sander, August. Men Without Masks: Faces of Germany 1910-1938. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, Ltd., 1973. ISBN: 9780821205334.
Sills, Vaughn. One Family. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001. ISBN: 9780820321998.
Silverman, Kenneth. Houdini!!!: The Career of Ehrich Weiss. New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1997. ISBN: 9780060928629.
Smith, W. Eugene, and Aileen Smith. Minamata. Tucson, AZ: Center for Creative Photography, 1981. ISBN: 9780938262053.
Snyder, Stephanie, et al. Snapshot Chronicles. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006. ISBN: 9781568985572.
Sorenson, Richard. The Edge of the Forest: Land, Childhood and Change in a New Guinea Protoagricultural Society. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1976. ISBN: 9780874748758.
Szarkowski, John, et al. The Photographer's Eye. New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 2007. ISBN: 9780870705274.
Thomas, Ann. Beauty of Another Order: Photography & Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780300073409.
Time Life Library of Photography - Photojournalism. New York, NY: Time-Life Books, 1971.
Wells, Samuel R. New Physiognomy, or, Signs of Character, as Manifested Through Temperament and External Forms and Especially in the Human Face Divine. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger LLC, 2007. ISBN: 9780548001523.
Willumson, Glenn Gardner. W. Eugene Smith and the Photographic Essay. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992. ISBN: 9780521414647.
Wright, Stephen, and Paul Wombell. Hashem El Madani: Studio Practices. London, England: Mind the Gap/Arab Image Foundation, 2005. ISBN: 9789953003238.
Young, Michael. Malinowski's Kiriwina. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998. ISBN: 9780226876504.