Studies in Literature and the Arts (487-0-1)
Topic
Walter Benjamin's Small History of Photography
Instructors
Maria Alejandra Uslenghi
847/467-1713
3-113 Crowe
Meeting Info
Kresge 3535 Span & Port Sem Rm: Wed 2:00PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
"Walter Benjamin's Small History of Photography"
The course will explore the theory and history of the photographic medium taking as point of departure Benjamin's writings from the 1930s on. As he studied the revolutionary changes in perception that technology introduced, he became one of photography's most important and influential thinkers. Photography's relation to memory, the medium's relationship to the unconscious, the changes mechanical reproducibility introduced for our aesthetic experiences, the social and political significance it acquired as a way to understand modern life and how it facilitates as well as shapes social relations, as well as how it allegorizes embodied and cognitive processes through which we engage the world are reflections that stem from his now famous essay. Taking as a point of departure the essay's reflection on the first century of photography's history, and the corpus of both photographers (Atget, Renger Patzsch, Sander, Bossfeldt, Freund, Krull, Abbott) and photographer's historians it gathers, we explore both the critical vocabulary Benjamin develops around them as well its conceptual apparatus. We closely analyze the photobooks Benjamin reviews in his essay as well as the photobook phenomenon in interwar years globally. Then we move to a secondary bibliography that produced significant interpretations of Benjamin's essay: Cadava, Silverman, Didi-Hubermann, Collingwood-Selby, Zervigón, and finally we assess its oblique influence in Barthes' Camera Lucida.