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Slide 01
Photography
- Light Writing
- From Greek phos (light) and graphe (writing) — photography is the art of writing with light, fixing a moment of the visible world that would otherwise vanish forever. In 190 years it has transformed how humanity remembers, communicates, mourns, and understands itself.
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Slide 02
Inventing the Photograph
- Origins
- 1826
- Nicéphore Niépce creates the oldest surviving photograph: "View from the Window at Le Gras" — an eight-hour exposure on a pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea. Barely legible, but permanently fixed.
- 1839
- Louis Daguerre presents the daguerreotype to the French Academy of Sciences; France immediately gifts the invention to the world free of patent. "From this day, painting is dead," reportedly says Paul Delaroche.
- 1839
- William Henry Fox Talbot announces the calotype: paper negatives producing multiple positive prints — the negative/positive process that defines photography for 160 years.
- 1851
- Frederick Scott Archer's wet collodion process: 5-second exposures, sharp detail, reproducible — photography becomes practical enough for portraiture and documentation at scale.
- 1888
- Kodak No. 1: "You press the button, we do the rest." 100-exposure roll film; pre-loaded camera sent back to factory for development. Photography democratized — the amateur is born.
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Slide 03
How Photography Works
- Technology
- Photography is fundamentally a physics problem: controlling light's interaction with a light-sensitive surface in a controlled space to create a permanent image. Every technological iteration has been about reducing the variables and increasing the photographer's control.
- The camera obscura
- The optical principle predates photography by 400 years: a pinhole or lens projects an inverted image of the outside world onto the opposite wall. Vermeer and Canaletto are suspected of using them as compositional aids.
- Film chemistry
- Silver halide crystals embedded in gelatin emulsion on a base; light causes chemical reaction in proportion to intensity; development amplifies the latent image; fixing makes it permanent by dissolving unexposed crystals.
- The exposure triangle
- Aperture (how much light enters), shutter speed (how long), ISO (sensitivity) — the three variables every photographer controls in every photograph. Every creative decision about light, motion, and depth derives from these three.
- Digital sensors
- Photosites on a CMOS sensor convert photons to electrical charge; Bayer filter pattern (RGGB) over each photosite; demosaicing algorithm interpolates color. Resolution measured in megapixels; dynamic range in stops; noise in shadow areas reveals the limits of any sensor.
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Slide 04
Photography as Evidence
- Documentary
- Photography's claim to be a transparent window on reality — that photographs are evidence of what happened — is simultaneously its greatest cultural power and its central epistemological problem.
- Roger Fenton — Crimean War (1855) — First extensive war photography; Fenton famously posed "before" and "after" versions of "The Valley of the Shadow of Death" cannonball image — constructing rather than capturing reality from the start
- Jacob Riis — How the Other Half Lives (1890) — Flash photography of New York slum conditions; images that shocked comfortable New Yorkers and directly drove housing reform legislation
- Lewis Hine — Child Labor (1908–1918) — Worked for the National Child Labor Committee documenting working children in mines, mills, and factories; his images helped pass the Keating-Owen Act
- FSA Photography Project (1935–1944) — Roy Stryker commissioned Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, and others to document Depression-era America for the Farm Security Administration; created the visual mythology of the New Deal era
- Every documentary photograph involves choices: where to stand, when to press the shutter, which image from the roll to print. The selection is an argument — "evidence" filtered through a human perspective
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Slide 05
The Face and the Camera
- Portraiture
- Portrait photography is photography's oldest and most commercially durable tradition — and its most philosophically fraught, because every portrait involves a power relationship between the photographer and the person photographed.
- Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon)
- Parisian portraitist who photographed every significant French intellectual and artist of the Second Empire — Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Sarah Bernhardt. Introduced electric lighting to photography; built a studio with artificial light in 1861.
- Julia Margaret Cameron
- Victorian photographer who intentionally used long exposures, soft focus, and domestic subjects to claim photography as fine art at a time when it was considered a mechanical trade. Herschel, Tennyson, Darwin — photographed with the same soft reverence as Madonnas.
- Richard Avedon
- White background; no props; subject in relationship with lens. "In the American West" (1985): drifters, waitresses, cowboys — the same ruthless clarity applied to people the fashion industry never photographed. Portraiture as democratic act.
- The selfie and self-portraiture
- Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills; Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency; the selfie as mass practice — billions of self-portraits made daily, constituting the largest self-portrait project in human history.
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Slide 06
Images That Changed the World
- Photojournalism
- Photojournalism insists on the photograph's capacity to bear witness — to create in the viewer a moral response to what is being done to other human beings. Some photographs have arguably altered history.
- Migrant Mother (Dorothea Lange, 1936) — Florence Owens Thompson with children in a California pea-pickers' camp; published in newspapers nationally; accelerated federal relief response within days of publication
- Nick Ut — The Terror of War / Napalm Girl (1972) — Kim Phúc running from napalm attack; won Pulitzer; frequently cited as having turned American public opinion against the Vietnam War; Nick Ut drove the girl to hospital after making the photograph
- Kevin Carter — The Vulture and the Little Girl (1993) — Sudanese famine; won 1994 Pulitzer; Carter committed suicide three months after receiving it; the ethics of witness versus intervention defined the photograph's entire cultural history
- Tank Man (Stuart Franklin, 1989) — Tiananmen Square; unknown man blocking a column of tanks; four photographers captured it simultaneously; still unpublishable inside China; one of the most reproduced photographs in history
- Alan Kurdi (2015) — Syrian refugee child drowned on Turkish beach; European Union refugee policy shifted measurably in the days following publication; the power and the limits of photographic compassion, simultaneously demonstrated
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Slide 07
Photography as Art
- Fine Art
- Photography's status as art was contested for its first century — by painters who saw it as a threat, by critics who saw it as mechanical, and by photographers themselves who debated whether to embrace or resist the comparison.
- Pictorialism
- Late 19th-century movement that deliberately made photographs look like paintings — soft focus, platinum printing, hand manipulation. Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession and Camera Notes journal fought for photography's acceptance as art through making it look like existing art.
- Straight photography
- The reaction: sharp focus, unmanipulated negative, precise tonal range. Edward Weston's peppers and nudes; Paul Strand's geometric abstractions; the argument that photography should embrace rather than disguise its mechanical nature.
- The f/64 Group
- Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham: named for the small aperture that maximizes depth of field; commitment to sharp, full-tonal range prints made from unretouched negatives as aesthetic and ethical position simultaneously.
- Photography in the museum
- MoMA's Photography Department founded 1940 by Beaumont Newhall; Edward Steichen's "The Family of Man" (1955): 503 photographs from 68 countries; 9 million visitors in global tour — the largest photography exhibition ever assembled.
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Slide 08
The Decisive Moment
- Street Photography
- Street photography — making photographs of strangers in public spaces, unposed, without announcement — is photography's most contested and most admired genre: a practice at the intersection of art, voyeurism, public space, and the ethics of looking.
- Henri Cartier-Bresson — Coined "the decisive moment" (l'instant décisif): the instant when form, gesture, and meaning align in a fraction of a second. Co-founded Magnum Photos (1947). The Leica as extension of the eye, never raised to the face to avoid breaking contact with subjects.
- Garry Winogrand — Photographed America with anxious restlessness; tilted horizons and wide angle distortion as formal equivalents of mid-century American disorientation; left 2,500 unedited rolls of film at his death — never seen, never processed
- Vivian Maier — Chicago nanny who made 150,000+ photographs across 40 years without ever showing them; discovered in a storage locker auction after her death; now among the most discussed street photographers — questions of authorship, access, and the posthumous construction of "greatness"
- Saul Leiter — Color street photography 40 years before color was accepted as serious; rain-blurred windows, red umbrellas, cropped figures; ignored by critics until 2006 retrospective; died 2013 at 89
- The ethics question — Legal in most jurisdictions to photograph people in public spaces; ethical debate ongoing about consent, context, and power — who photographs whom, who benefits, who is exposed
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Slide 09
Landscape Photography
- Landscape
- Landscape photography has always carried ideological weight alongside its aesthetic dimension — images of land encode beliefs about ownership, nature's relationship to culture, and what counts as "wilderness."
- Ansel Adams and the American West
- Adams's Zone System and monumental black-and-white prints of Yosemite celebrated as conservation advocacy — and criticized for producing a "wilderness" that erased Indigenous presence.
- New Topographics (1975)
- Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Stephen Shore: the camera turned on suburban and industrial landscapes — parking lots, tract houses, warehouses. Anti-sublime as aesthetic and ethical position.
- Edward Burtynsky — Manufactured Landscapes
- Industrial landscapes at epic scale: ship-breaking yards, oil fields, tailings ponds. Beauty in destruction as a paradox the work refuses to resolve.
- Climate photography
- James Balog's Extreme Ice Survey; glacial retreat documented over years; photography confronting its limitation as a still medium in a world of slow-moving catastrophe.
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Slide 10
Bearing Witness
- War Photography
- War photography is where photography's ethical contradictions are most acute: every image of suffering involves a decision to photograph rather than intervene; every published image involves a selection of what the public sees of what is done in its name.
- Robert Capa — "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough." Spanish Civil War; D-Day (11 surviving frames from Omaha Beach after a darkroom technician accidentally destroyed most); killed by a landmine in Indochina, 1954
- Larry Burrows — Color photography from Vietnam; Reaching Out (1966) — wounded Marine reaching toward fallen comrade; killed in a helicopter shootdown over Laos in 1971 alongside three other photographers
- Don McCullin — Shell-shocked Marine in Hue (1968); Biafran albino boy; the ethics of his work as his central preoccupation: "I never take a picture without feeling haunted. I feel guilty and yet I still do it."
- James Nachtwey — Considered the greatest war photographer alive; every major conflict since 1980; recipient of World Press Photo awards; described his work as an effort to make images "so disturbing that they force the viewer to ask what can be done"
- Embedded journalism — US military's embedding system post-2003 traded access for constraints; images from Iraq produced within these terms are very different from images produced outside them
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Slide 11
The Monochrome Tradition
- Black and White
- Black-and-white photography is no longer a technological default but a deliberate aesthetic choice — one that strips the image of color's immediate emotional distraction and replaces it with form, light, tone, and shadow as primary visual language.
- Why monochrome persists
- Without color, the viewer must work harder to read the image — and in that work finds more. Shadows become active forces. Skin texture becomes topography. The photograph becomes less immediately documentary and more explicitly interpretive.
- Ansel Adams's Zone System
- A method for previsualization: the photographer imagines the final print's tonal range before exposing the film, then exposes and develops to achieve it. 11 zones from pure black to pure white; shadows placed deliberately on the Zone scale.
- Sebastião Salgado — Workers and Genesis
- Large-format black and white applied to subjects of epic scale: gold miners in Serra Pelada; Kuwati oil fires; Rwandan refugees; the monochrome as equalizer and as mythologizer simultaneously — criticized for aestheticizing suffering.
- Contemporary monochrome
- Daido Moriyama's grainy black-and-white Tokyo street photography; Hiroshi Sugimoto's long-exposure theater interiors; black-and-white as deliberate signal of historicity, seriousness, and connection to the medium's origins.
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Slide 12
The Color Revolution
- Color Photography
- Color photography existed from the 1890s but was not accepted as serious artistic practice until the 1970s — when a generation of photographers at the MoMA exhibition "New Color" (1976) successfully argued that color was not decoration but content.
- William Eggleston — 1976 MoMA exhibition of dye-transfer prints of ordinary Southern American subjects was initially ridiculed ("perfectly banal") then recognized as transformative; trivial subjects invested with saturated color intensity that creates uncomfortable beauty
- Stephen Shore — Uncommon Places (1982): American vernacular landscape in large format 8×10; motel rooms, parking lots, intersections; the photographic equivalent of Hopper's Nighthawks applied to the highway strip
- Joel Meyerowitz — Early champion of color street photography; Cape Light (1978): summer light on Cape Cod as subject matter; demonstration that color had its own emotional vocabulary unavailable in monochrome
- Wolfgang Tillmans — Color as index of light quality; the crumpled print as sculptural object; fashion photography, queerness, abstraction, and political portraiture in the same practice; Turner Prize 2000
- Rineke Dijkstra — Large-format color portraits of beach teenagers, new mothers, soldiers; color specificity of flesh tone and light as the central subject; bodies in moments of becoming and transition
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Slide 13
Photography and Identity
- Identity
- Photography has been both a tool of surveillance and classification (by states, by racists, by colonizers) and a tool of self-definition and liberation (by communities historically denied representation or misrepresented by others' cameras).
- Bertillon's mug shots
- Systematic criminal identification (1880s): standardized frontal and profile portraits; biometric classification as state surveillance. "Criminal type" as a racial concept encoded in photographic convention.
- Colonial photography
- Victorian ethnographic photography depicted colonized peoples as curiosity specimens or racial types rather than individuals. The colonial gaze in photographic grammar — actively countered by postcolonial photographers today.
- Nan Goldin — Ballad of Sexual Dependency
- Snapshot aesthetic; queer artists, drag queens, and drug users in 1970s–80s New York; a counterarchive against erasure of LGBTQ+ life and the AIDS epidemic.
- Carrie Mae Weems — Kitchen Table Series
- Staged photographs at a domestic table; single Black woman in multiple roles; the ordinary space as stage for exploring race, gender, and everyday life.
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Slide 14
Dressing the Image
- Fashion Photography
- Fashion photography is the most commercially remunerative and most culturally pervasive application of photography — its images shape global standards of beauty, desirability, and aspiration for billions of people who never think of it as art.
- Edward Steichen — Made fashion photography glamorous at Condé Nast publications; studio lighting that elevated the garment to icon; the fashion photographer as artist not commercial hack
- Richard Avedon at Harper's Bazaar — 1945–1965; models in movement; fashion images with documentary energy; collaboration with art director Alexey Brodovitch
- Helmut Newton — Power and sexuality; wealthy women as both subjects and objects; controversy that never reduced his influence
- Steven Meisel — Multiple Vogue Italia covers per year; Madonna's Sex book; fashion photography as cultural provocation for three decades
- Juergen Teller — Anti-glamour; on-camera flash; celebrities without flattery; the fashion image as truth-claim against its own conventions
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Slide 15
Photography and Conceptual Art
- Conceptual
- From the late 1960s, artists began using photography not as a medium for making beautiful images but as a tool for questioning the nature of representation itself — what images claim to be, what they hide, and who controls their meaning.
- Ed Ruscha
- Sunset Strip (1966): 25 feet of contact-printed photographs of both sides of Sunset Boulevard; every building documented with deadpan neutrality; the book as the artwork rather than the individual photograph.
- Bernd and Hilla Becher
- Typologies of industrial structures — water towers, gas tanks, blast furnaces — photographed with identical framing, neutral sky, no shadow; presented in grids; systematic documentation as aesthetic system; taught an entire generation of German photographers (Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer).
- Cindy Sherman
- Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980): 69 black-and-white images of "herself" in the roles of generic women from 1950s–60s B-movies. No actual films exist; every role is a construction; the self as perpetual performance — feminist theory as photographic practice.
- Andreas Gursky
- Large-format images of globalization: stock exchanges, factories, Rhein landscapes, supermarket shelves; digitally composited to represent a hyperreal version of global capitalism that could not be photographed from a single vantage point.
- Thomas Demand
- Photographs of elaborate paper models of significant spaces (Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment, the Florida recount room) — then destroys the models; the photograph of a model of an event, not the event itself; representation at three removes.
- Taryn Simon
- An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar: photographing spaces inaccessible to the public — nuclear waste storage, CIA headquarters, live HIV cultures. Bureaucratic access as conceptual strategy.
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Slide 16
Tools That Changed Photography
- The Camera
- The history of photographic technology is a history of decreasing barriers to entry — each technological iteration making photography faster, lighter, cheaper, and available to more people in more situations.
- Leica (1925) — Oskar Barnack's 35mm camera: small, quiet, fast; enabled photography in available light without a tripod; created the aesthetic of the decisive moment by making mobility possible; still in production and still the definitive reportage camera
- Rolleiflex (1929) — Medium format twin-lens reflex; waist-level viewfinder means the camera is not at the eye, making it less intrusive; Diane Arbus used it for her most intimate portraits of strangers
- Polaroid (1948) — Edwin Land; instant image-making as social act; "land camera" that produced a physical object immediately; conceptually fascinating because the photograph is singular — it cannot be reprinted; Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe
- Nikon F (1959) — Professional SLR system; interchangeable lenses; robust enough for field use; became the definitive photojournalist's tool for 30 years
- Canon EOS 5D Mark II (2008) — First DSLR to shoot broadcast-quality video; merged still photography and filmmaking in a single body; democratized cinema aesthetics; used by television and independent filmmakers immediately after release
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Slide 17
The Alchemy of Printing
- Darkroom
- Traditional darkroom printing is chemistry, physics, and artistic judgment simultaneously — an analog process that transforms a negative into a final print through a series of interventions each of which changes the image's meaning.
- The enlarger and easel
- Negative held in the enlarger; light projected through it onto photographic paper in the easel below; exposure time and aperture control the base density of the print. The darkroom as a controlled-light environment where every intrusion disrupts the process.
- Dodging and burning
- Dodging withholds light from specific areas (lightens them); burning adds light to specific areas (darkens them). Ansel Adams's prints were routinely dodged and burned for 30+ minutes — his negatives and final prints often look dramatically different from uninterpreted exposures.
- Alternative processes
- Cyanotype (blueprints); Albumen printing; Platinum/Palladium printing; Gum bichromate; Salt prints — 19th-century processes revived by contemporary practitioners for their tonal qualities, archival stability, and handmade character.
- The gelatin silver print
- Standard 20th-century photographic print; silver particles embedded in gelatin; archivally stable if properly processed; the definition of a "photographic" object for a century — now being replaced by inkjet as the standard exhibition print medium.
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Slide 18
Magnum Photos
- Magnum
- Magnum Photos (founded 1947 by Capa, Cartier-Bresson, Rodger, and Seymour) is the world's most prestigious photographic cooperative — the primary institutional carrier of photojournalism's ethical and artistic values.
- Photographers own their negatives and control their rights — a contractual assertion of authorship unprecedented in the industry at the time of founding
- Members elect new members; membership is rare, contested, and takes years of demonstrated work; approximately 90 members globally
- Members: Cartier-Bresson, Capa, Eve Arnold, Sebastião Salgado, Josef Koudelka, Mary Ellen Mark, Susan Meiselas, Steve McCurry, Alec Soth
- Controversy: Steve McCurry's digital manipulation revelations exposed the gap between the organization's ethical commitments and individual practice
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Slide 19
Truth and Fabrication
- Manipulation
- Photographic manipulation is as old as photography — but digital tools have made it undetectable at the level of common visual literacy, raising fundamental questions about what photographs prove and whether they can still be trusted as evidence.
- Historical manipulation
- Alexander Gardner repositioned a corpse at Gettysburg for "A Sharpshooter's Last Sleep" (1863); Stalin erased purged officials from official photographs; combination printing (multiple negatives) began with Henry Peach Robinson in 1858.
- Photoshop (1990)
- Thomas Knoll's software made digital image manipulation accessible to anyone; skin retouching, compositing, color grading — all previously requiring specialized darkroom skills — became available to any photo editor. The industry changed overnight.
- Deepfakes and synthetic images
- AI-generated photographs indistinguishable from real ones; Midjourney, DALL-E 3, Stable Diffusion; the 2023 Pope in a white puffer jacket that circulated as real; the erosion of photography's evidentiary status is accelerating faster than authentication tools can compensate.
- World Press Photo standards
- The world's most prestigious photojournalism award now runs technical tests on all winning entries; cloning, compositing, and excessive processing disqualify entries; the line between "editing" and "manipulation" is the central ongoing ethical debate in the profession.
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Slide 20
The Album and the Archive
- Photography and Memory
- Photography has fundamentally changed humanity's relationship to memory — creating an archive of the past that is simultaneously more detailed and more selective than any preceding technology for preserving experience.
- The family photograph album: a curated narrative selecting happy moments and presentable appearances — a memory that is partly genuine and partly aspirational self-construction
- Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977): "To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed." The photograph as a claim of possession over a moment that cannot be recovered
- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (1980): studium (general cultural interest) versus punctum (the detail that pierces you personally); photography as a technology for mourning what is now absent
- Holocaust photography: evidence made by perpetrators; the absence of photographs from certain sites; ongoing debate about displaying images of victims in extremis
- The smartphone has made everyone a compulsive photographer of daily life — but research suggests that photographing an experience reduces retention of it in memory, as if the camera takes the memory so the mind does not have to
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Slide 21
Photography at Auction
- The Market
- Photography's art market emerged slowly — prints were long considered reproducible and therefore without the scarcity that drives auction value — and has now established that photography can achieve prices comparable to painting, particularly for unique objects or strictly limited editions.
- Price records
- Andreas Gursky's "Rhein II" (1999): $4.3M at Christie's 2011 — then the most expensive photograph ever sold. Edward Weston's "Nautilus" and Cindy Sherman's Untitled #96 also exceeded $3M. The prices reflect the collector's assessment of art historical significance, not photographic beauty alone.
- The edition question
- Most photographic prints exist in editions (5, 10, 25); earlier prints command higher prices; the negative can theoretically produce unlimited prints — scarcity is contractually rather than physically enforced. This makes the authentication of photographic editions a complex legal and ethical question.
- Vintage prints
- A print made at the time the photograph was taken, by or under the supervision of the photographer; more archivally uncertain than modern inkjet but carries documentary and historical weight; often more expensive than larger modern prints of the same image.
- NFT photography
- Beeple's "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" ($69M, Christie's 2021) established NFTs as an auction category; subsequent collapse of NFT values left many photographers who had entered the market facing significant losses; the intersection of photography with blockchain remains unsettled.
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Slide 22
Photography Goes Digital
- Digital Revolution
- The transition from film to digital photography between roughly 1995 and 2010 was the most rapid and complete technological transformation in the medium's history — and its creative and economic consequences are still being evaluated.
- Kodak invented the digital sensor in 1975 but suppressed it to protect film revenue — digital eventually destroyed that business regardless; Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012
- The Nikon D1 (1999) was the first professional DSLR practical enough for news photography; within 5 years virtually every newsroom had transitioned to digital workflows
- Instant review changed the feedback loop: film photographers shot economically; digital photographers shoot abundantly and review constantly — both a liberation and a distraction from seeing
- Raw files separate capture from interpretation: sensor data manipulated in Lightroom produces the final image — raising ongoing questions about where photography ends and image editing begins
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Slide 23
The Camera in Your Pocket
- Smartphone
- The integration of cameras into smartphones has produced the largest expansion of photographic practice in history — and the most consequential disruption of photography's traditional economics, aesthetics, and social function simultaneously.
- Scale
- 1.7 trillion photographs taken in 2020; more than were taken in all of photography's previous 180 years combined. The sheer volume has changed what it means to document, share, or witness anything.
- Computational photography
- Night Sight, Portrait Mode, HDR+: modern smartphone cameras are primarily software, not optics. Multiple exposures composited instantly; AI determines what's in focus, where skin tones should be, how much noise to reduce. "Photography" increasingly means "computational image synthesis."
- Social media as gallery
- Instagram, in its first iteration, was a photography app with aesthetic filters; it restructured how billions thought about making and sharing images; the "feed" replaced the photo album as the primary form of photographic self-presentation.
- Destroyed business models
- Stock photography agencies (Getty, Corbis): billions of smartphone images licensed for near-zero cost destroyed traditional stock rates. Consumer camera sales fell 80%+ after 2012. The professional photography market bifurcated: the middle disappeared, the top survived.
- Photography and social movements
- Rodney King beating (1991); Eric Garner (2014); George Floyd (2020) — bystander smartphone footage as both evidence and activism. The ubiquitous camera as accountability technology; counter-surveillance by the surveilled.
- Film's revival
- Film sales growing 5–10% annually since 2012 — same year digital camera sales peaked. Younger photographers discovering film as deliberate aesthetic practice; Kodak relaunching stocks; Polaroid resurging; the analog object as antidote to digital infinity.
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Slide 24
Photographers Working Now
- Contemporary Masters
- Zanele Muholi
- South African visual activist; portraits of Black LGBTQ+ people; confronting violence and invisibility; uses "visual activist" rather than "artist" as a deliberate statement of purpose.
- Deana Lawson
- Staged domestic-interior photographs; Black American subjects; extraordinary formal control; MacArthur Genius Grant 2022; among the most celebrated photographers working today.
- Alec Soth
- Large-format road photography; Sleeping by the Mississippi; NIAGARA; heir to Robert Frank's tradition of the American periphery as subject for serious photography.
- Taryn Simon
- Research-intensive conceptual photography; An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar; Paperwork and the Will of Capital; photography as investigative methodology.
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Slide 25
Making a Photograph
- Process
- What actually happens when a photographer makes a picture — the technical decisions, the aesthetic choices, the ethical considerations, and the moment of commitment that produces a final image?
- Seeing — Before any camera decision, the photographer decides what is worth photographing and from where; pre-photographic seeing is the least teachable and most essential skill
- Exposure decisions — Shutter speed controls motion blur; aperture controls depth of field; ISO controls sensitivity and noise. Every creative decision about light and time derives from these three.
- The moment — A fraction of a second separates a decisive image from a near-miss; some photographers make thousands to get one; the selection of when to press the shutter is the primary act
- Editing (selection) — From hundreds of exposures, selecting one; the editing process is as creative as the shooting; many photographers are better editors than shooters, or the reverse
- Post-processing — Dodging, burning, color correction; the distinction between "correcting" and "altering" an image is where photographic ethics resides; different genres have different norms
- Output — Print, screen, publication, or exhibition; the same image carries different meaning at 4×6 on a phone and 40×60 on a gallery wall; final form is part of the photographic decision
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Slide 26
How We Think About Photography
- Theory
- A rich critical and philosophical tradition has developed around photography's unique properties — its indexical relationship to reality, its temporal dimension, its capacity for both evidence and fabrication.
- Susan Sontag — On Photography (1977)
- "To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed." Photography as a grammar and, more importantly, as an ethics. The tourist camera as an instrument of cultural extraction. Images replacing experience rather than enhancing it.
- Roland Barthes — Camera Lucida (1980)
- Studium (the general cultural interest of an image) versus punctum (the detail that wounds you specifically, unpredictably). Photography as the art form of death — every photograph says "this was" and thus announces what is now absent.
- Allan Sekula
- Photography in the social context of its production and consumption; images cannot be understood apart from the institutional frameworks (journalism, advertising, police records, medicine) within which they are made and received.
- John Berger — Ways of Seeing (1972)
- How we see is conditioned by what we know, believe, and expect; photographs are always ideologically situated; the nude, advertising, and oil painting share assumptions about ownership and desire that can be read once you know to look for them.
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Slide 27
Photography in Science
- Science
- Photography transformed scientific practice — enabling the accumulation of visual evidence at scales and speeds impossible with drawing alone, and revealing aspects of the natural world invisible to unaided human vision.
- Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies (1870s–80s) — Sequences proving the galloping horse lifts all four hooves simultaneously; physiology and art transformed by the same images
- Astrophotography — First star photograph (Vega, 1850); Hubble imagery made the universe visually democratic; 2019 Event Horizon Telescope image of M87's black hole synthesized from eight observatories
- X-ray photography (Röntgen, 1895) — First medical imaging; Röntgen photographed his wife's hand; first Nobel Prize in Physics (1901); medical practice transformed overnight
- Rosalind Franklin's Photo 51 (1952) — X-ray crystallography of DNA used without her permission by Watson and Crick; they received the Nobel; her contribution erased until decades later
- Macro and micro photography — From Blossfeldt's plant forms to scanning electron microscope imagery; making visible what is too small, too fast, or too large for unaided perception
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Slide 28
The Ethics of the Camera
- Ethics
- Every photograph involves at minimum one ethical question: the right to make this image. The more consequential the subject, the more acute the ethical stakes — and the less clear the correct answer.
- Consent and context
- Is consent needed to photograph strangers in public? Legal answers vary; ethical answers depend on purpose, who is shown, and who benefits. Street photography and surveillance photography of the same people raise entirely different ethical questions.
- The right to photograph grief
- "The public's right to know" can be a euphemism for "the public's appetite for others' tragedy." The line between witness and voyeurism is drawn differently by every photographer and editor.
- The "poverty gaze"
- Photographs of poor or non-Western subjects made by wealthy-nation photographers for wealthy audiences; who profits from the image; whose suffering becomes whose career.
- AI and training data
- AI image generators trained on billions of photographs without consent or compensation; Getty Images lawsuit (2023); the question of what "copying" means when a model learns from an image rather than reproducing it directly.
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Slide 29
What Comes Next
- Future
- Photography in 2025 and beyond faces challenges to its core identity as a medium: what is a "photograph" when the image is computed rather than captured? What is "photographic truth" when AI generation is indistinguishable from camera-made images?
- AI image generation — Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion: "photorealistic" images made without a camera; the photographic aesthetic as a style AI can reproduce; the evidentiary claim of photography under permanent assault
- C2PA content credentials — Industry coalition (Adobe, Reuters, Canon, others) developing metadata standards that embed capture information into images to distinguish AI-generated from camera-made; adoption incomplete but growing
- Computational imaging — Light field cameras, computational aperture, neural network reconstruction: cameras that capture more information than traditional lenses and compute the final image in post; the "photograph" increasingly a processed output rather than an optical recording
- Immersive photography — 360° spherical capture; spatial photography (Apple Vision Pro); the image as environment rather than object; changing the fundamental geometry of the photographic experience from a window to a room
- Film's place — Analog photography will not disappear; its specific materiality — grain, halation, the unpredictable chemistry of exposure and development — is precisely what makes it valuable as a deliberate choice in an era of computational perfection
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Slide 30
Writing with Light
- Conclusion
- Photography is 190 years old — barely more than a single long human life. In that time it has transformed warfare, journalism, science, fashion, family life, self-perception, political consciousness, and the very concept of visual truth. No other technology has so rapidly and so completely restructured how humanity sees itself.
- It is also, at its most essential, an act of attention: the choice to stop, look carefully, and press the shutter. Whatever technology surrounds and complicates this act, the act itself remains what it has always been — a claim that this moment, this light, this particular arrangement of the world, was worth preserving.
- "Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst." — Henri Cartier-Bresson
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