HAA 230 History of Photography I: 1826-1925
Tuesday, Thursday 12:30-1:45pm 319 Stevenson Hall
Professor: Peter Hales
Office: 208-A Henry Hall
Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays,1:45-2:45, Tuesdays 330-430: For other times, call first or see me after class to set up an appointment
Phone: 413-2461, Home (not between 6 and 8 or after 10pm) 773-764-9805
email: pbhales@uic.edu
webpages: www.uic.edu/~pbhales
Required Books: Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History
Vicki Goldberg, Photography in Print
Optional/Recommended: John Szarkowski, Photography Until Now
Grade Requirements: 2 (2-3 page, typed) papers............25%
Midterm.....................................25%
Final...........................................25%
Class Participation .....................25%
This course is the first half of a two-semester survey of the history of photography. We will examine photography as an artistic medium, as a part of everyday life, as a central part of modern culture, and as a commercial profession. Lectures will be held from 1230-145pm each class day. Please feel free to interrupt to question or comment within sane limits. The short papers will serve as practical excursions in looking at photographs, evaluating their importance, and placing them in some non-personal context. NO LATE PAPERS WILL BE ACCEPTED WITHOUT PRIOR APPROVAL! Midterm and final exams will include identifications of relevant terms and concepts, and short essays. As the semester is exceedingly short, I strongly discourage absences. Readings are due at the beginning of each scheduled weekly class. You are already a week late on the first reading assignment! Don't think you can ignore the reading. No one who does ever passes. Reserve reading is just as imperative as the textbook materials. I keep a running tab on who's checking out the reserve readings.
Because we are engaged every minute with pictures and because these pictures were made to be meaningful and significant within their own historical moment, you will find it necessary to slip in and out of your own personality, your own time, place and culture. That’s part of the mystery and pleasure of historical and critical studies. You are not by any means to abandon your opinions or suppress them. But they are, as they must be, grounded in your own experience. Photographs have a way of transforming over time– today, a picture like the one on the cover of your textbook means something very different than it did. It is a gloss on ideas of beauty, of femininity, of domesticity, of pleasure, that are now understood as histories of suppression and anachronistic conceptions of the correct way to be a woman. So also is it a picture, today, about what it meant to be a man, what power one had in looking, and how different the act of looking might be between a male observer and a female. All of these are reasons the picture is on the cover of Marien’s textbook, and all are significant insights into the picture. But they aren’t the meaning(s) of the picture as it was made, and understood at its making– made by a female photographer, to be seen by both men and women, people comfortable in the arts of that time, not the arts of this one, comfortable in the politics and the social relationships of that time, not this one. Yet, this picture can also be seen as a site of discomfort, even then. How do we tease out these meanings? How do we understand the reality of the past, now gone from us, now alien and even exotic, and how can we connect the past and the present? These are the questions that underlie this course– questions about photographs, yes, but more potently and importantly about being-in-the-world. They aren’t easy questions but they are illuminating, and they can be life-changing. However answering them requires that we develop a repertoire: of knowledge about the medium itself; of knowledge about the surrounding artistic media that were significant then– painting, printmaking, literature, criticism– and that influenced and interacted with photography; of knowledge about the historical and cultural circumstances that took hold and surrounded the moment when the photograph was made and understood. How many of us remember what a bluestocking was? Or when women were given the vote in the United States, or allowed to own property independently of husbands, fathers, and children? These are facts that matter in understanding the picture on the cover; so also the name of the artist, her dates of working, her place and her affiliations, her goals for her pictures, both stated and hinted. All of these are the underlying materials that must be mastered, and will be mastered, if incompletely, in this class.
This is why the reading is so important, why learning names of artists is worth the work, why the reserve materials are significant.
Let me warn you of something. The lectures in class will not recapitulate the basic narrative of the history of photography told in your books and materials. I will assume that you have already read these materials and that we are then free to move around and beyond that narrative, into questions that require that knowledge to be meaningful. I am not a linear lecturer. The subject of a lecture often shifts, at least on the surface, during the classroom period. Always the pictures are there to test and to accuse, to implore and to state, serving as witnesses, as evidence, as judges, of what all of us will say and think in that class. For that reason I will try only to show pictures that are rich in significance. Some may be shocking, some obtuse, some violent, some pornographic, some politically or propagandistically offensive. The historical record does not go away because it is disturbing.
Week Beginning:
August 24
Invention of Photography, and the Context
of Discovery-- Enlightenment and Romantic ideas of art and nature
the camera obscura
Niepce and Daguerre in France
Talbot in England
Early reception: Government patents, artistic response.
Reading:
Marien, chapter 1
Goldberg, pp. 25-48
August 31
Early European Explorations
Talbot and the encoding of Romanticism
Hill and Adamson-- production/art
Early French photographers
Reading: Marien, Chapter 2
Goldberg, 49-70
-September 7 Art, Commerce, Culture: The Daguerreotype in America
American democratic art ideals
Operators: Commercial portraiture
Entrepreneurs: the studio system
Artists: Southworth and Hawes
Cultural Messengers: Whitney, Plumbe, Hesler
Daguerreotype cases and the "precious object" tradition
Reading: Rudisill, "Mirror Image" in Vicki Goldberg, Photography in Print, pp. 70-76
"Thorvaldson Daguerreotype Cases" from History of Photography Quarterly, April 1978, pp. 35-40 (on reserve)
looking assignment: see the daguerreotypes at the Chicago Historical Society, and the Art Institute of Chicago (those on display)
First Paper Assignment: Choose a photograph that is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Historical Society, or in one of the standard textbooks and that falls within the dates of this course. If it comes from a published source, you must xerox the image and include the xerox. Write a brief, well-argued, well-written appreciation of the photograph. No more than one-and-a-half pages on this one! If you are nervous, read John Szarkowski's short essays in his book Looking at Photographs. They will provide you with a daunting image of how a true master does this. The paper is due October 28.
-September 14 New Technologies, New Visions and the modern world
Tintype and Ambrotype
Wet-Collodion technology
carte-de-visite
Reading: Marien, chapter 3.
-September 21 The Crimean and Civil War photographers
Reading: Keith F. Davis, "A Terrible Distinctness: Photography of the Civil War Era," in Sandweiss, ed., Photography in Nineteenth Century America, pp. 130-203 (on reserve).
-September 28 Landscapes, Cityscapes, and Romantic Visions I: Europe and the Near East
Gustave Le Gray
"The World Made Small"-- Blanquard-Evrard and the photography book: photography as surrogate experience
Travel photography in the Near East
-October 5 Landscapes, Cityscapes, and Romantic Visions II: America!
The context for landscape worship in America
Early landscapes
Landscape as democratic art
Science, Nature, and Art: William Henry Jackson, Timothy H. O'Sullivan, Eadweard Muybridge, Carleton E. Watkins
Landscape as Commodity: William Henry Jackson
Reading: Naef, Era of Exploration :ALL OF IT
Jackson, "Diaries," etc., in Goldberg, pp. 166-170
Novak, "Landscape Permuted..." in Goldberg, pp. 171-179
Hales, Silver Cities, chaps.1,2,3
Goldberg, pp. 100-114
-October 12: American Landscapes, Muted and Mutated: 1870-1900
reading: review for exam
- October 14 Thursday MIDTERM EXAM
-October 19 Art Movements in Mid-Century Europe
Oscar G. Rejlander
Julia Margaret Cameron
Lady Eastlake
Henry Peach Robinson
Reading:Lady Eastlake, "Review," in Goldberg, pp. 88-99
Rejlander, "An Apology..." in Goldberg, 141-147
Robinson, "Pictorial Effect in Photography,"in Goldberg, pp. 155-162;
Cameron, "Annals..." in Goldberg, p. 180-187
Reminder: First Paper Due October 31!
-October 26 The Business of Photography 1860-1895
William Henry Jackson
F.J.Haynes
stereoscope and stereograph
Kilburn
Reading:
Marien, Chapter 4
Holmes, "The Stereoscope and Stereograph," in Goldberg, pp. 100-114;
Hales, "American Views and the Romance of Modernization," in Photography in Nineteenth Century America, pp. 204-257.
Hand in first paper: October 28 BEGINNING OF CLASS
Writing Assignment II: November 23 due date
Please follow exactly the instructions for the first writing assignment, except this time choose a picture dated between 1865 and 1915. All other criteria apply.
-November 2 The Rise of the Amateur, 1865-1900
George Eastman
Kodak
Frances Benjamin Johnston
Henry L. Rand
Reading: Lewis Carroll, "Photography Extraordinary," and "Hiawatha's Photographing," in Goldberg, pp. 115-122;
Szarkowski, ""George Eastman and Alfred Stieglitz" from Photography Until Now, pp. 125-175;
Brian Coe and Paul Gates, The Snapshot Photograph, pp. 1-30.
-November 9 Amateurs and Art: Europe
dry-plate technology
the devoted amateur
Peter Henry Emerson
the Linked Ring
Reading: Emerson, "Naturalistic Photography," in Goldberg, pp. 190-199
Second Writing Assignment due November 26
-November 16 Amateurs and Art: The American Photosecession
Alfred Stieglitz
the American Amateur Photographer
Camera Work
Gertrude Kasebier, Steichen and the rest
Reading: reserve articles by Ulrich Keller, "The Myth of Art Photography" parts I and II, in H.of P.Quarterly, Oct-Dec 1984, pp. 249-275; and Jan.-Mar., 1985
-Stieglitz, "The Hand Camera..." in Goldberg, pp. 214-217
-Hartmann, "A Visit to Steichen's Studio," in Goldberg, pp. 233-237
-Greenough, "Of Charming Glens...: American Pictorial Photography," in Photography in Nineteenth Century America, pp. 258-317.
- November 23 Jacob Riis and the Birth of Documentary
Predecessors to Riis: Annan and Thomson
Rise of the Picture Press
How The Other Half Lives
Reading: Hales, Silver Cities, (new edition– manuscript chapter is on the web at http://www.uic.edu/~pbhales/courses/Silver.htm
Second Paper is Due Tuesday November 30 before class.
-November 30 Photography and Modernization: Eugene Atget, Lewis Hine and Paul Strand
Reading: Berenice Abbott, "The World of Atget,"
Alan Trachtenberg, "Lewis Hine: the World of His Art,"
Paul Strand, "The Art Motive in Photography," and Milton Brown, "An Interview with Paul Strand," all in Goldberg, pp. 238-290 passim.
Final Exam is Friday December 10, 1030-1230. No makeups.