Photography ART 828, Issues in Contemporary Photography

A full-year course for all graduate photography students. This course explores approaches to contemporary photography, from 1975 to the present, beginning with the first generation of postmodernism. Students examine the relationship that art photography has to popular culture and the blurred relationship among photography, film, fashion, advertising, and pornography. Trends and approaches to art photography, including tableaux, appropriation, abstraction, and simulation, are studied. Students also explore how contemporary photographers have worked to challenge, expand, and reinvent such traditional genres as portraiture, the nude, landscape, and still-life photography. Visiting artists, photographers, and filmmakers talk about their work in the context of the discussions at hand.