Readings

This page contains readings assigned for each class session. Full citations for all text sources are listed below.

WEEK # TOPICS READINGS
1 Introduction  
2 The power and ambiguity of photography Edwards, Short Introduction, chapters 1-5.
3 Looking at faces

Edwards, Short Introduction, review chapters 1-2.

Hamilton & Hargreaves, The Beautiful and the Damned, all.

Trachtenberg, "Illustrious Americans."

Wells, Physiognomy, pp. 162-165, 168-171, 192-195, 344-345, 360-361, and 382-383.

Kemp, "A Perfect and Faithful Record."

Banks, Visual Methods, pp. 34-47.

4 Snaps/albums/postcards/
itinerants, everyday photography and people's lives

Edwards, Short Introduction, chapter 6.

Batchen, Geoffrey. "Vernacular Photographies." History of Photography 24 (Autumn 2000): 262-269.

Katriel, Tamar, and Thomas Farrell. "Scrapbooks as Cultural Texts: An American Art of Memory." Text and Performance Quarterly 11 (January 1991): 1-17.

Kuhn, "Remembrance."

Frizot, New History, chapter 41, "Rituals and Customs."

Jacobbi, Marianne. "Deleting Him." The Boston Globe, January 13, 2008, p. 38.

Amir, "From Memorial Books to Invaluable Historical Documentation." (This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader.PDF)

Meir Holtzman Album

Sprague, "Yoruba Photography."

Parker & Neal, Los Ambulantes, pp. 1-22. (skim)

Simmonds, Posy. "Every Picture Tells a Story." p. 212 in Lenman, Oxford Companion.

5 Truth and deception

Gladwell, Malcolm. "The Picture Problem." The New Yorker, December 13, 2004, pp. 74-81.

Chéroux, The Perfect Medium, pp. 20-23 and 29-34 (read); pp. 73-78 and 92-94 (skim).

Harvey, Photography and Spirit, pp. 56-69, 70-75, and 80-86.

King, The Commissar Vanishes, pp. 9-13 and 32.

Moon Base Clavius (Read section on photo analysis)

"The Truth of the Matter." (On two famous disputed war photographs)

Brower, Kenneth. "Photography in the Age of Falsification." The Atlantic (May 1998): 92-111.

6 Advertising photography and gender Goffman, Gender Advertisements, all.
7 Photographing the Great Depression

Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream, chapter 4.

Wright, 12 Million Black Voices, all.

Levine, "The Historian and the Icon," and Trachtenberg, "From Image to Story." In Documenting America, pp. 15-71. (optional)

8 Imperialism and photography

Mitchell, "Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order."

Faris, "A Political Primer on Photography/Anthropology," (read) and Street, "British Popular Anthropology," (skim). In Edwards, Anthropology and Photography.

Lutz, Catherine, and Jane Collins. "The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: the Example of National Geographic." Visual Anthropology Review 7 (1991): 143-149.

Poole, Deborah. "An Excess of Description: Ethnography, Race, and Visual Technologies." Annual Review of Anthropology 34 (2005): 159-179.

9 Muck-raking, advocacy, and propaganda

Frizot, New History, chapter 30, "The Way Life Goes," and chapter 33, "The Involvement of the Photojournalist."

Dunaway, "Nature on the Coffee Table," (required) and "Thoreau with a Camera," (optional). In Natural Visions.

Ferrato, "Living with the Enemy: Domestic Violence."

Goldberg, "Documenting Poverty."

Levi-Strauss, "The Documentary Debate," and "Photography and Propaganda." In Between the Eyes.

10 Photographing people's lives: photo-essays and photo-ethnography

Collier, Visual Anthropology, pp. 19-28, 44-63, and 77-97.

Pink, Doing Visual Ethnography, chapter 3.

Banks, Visual Methods, chapter 5.

Bateson & Mead, Balinese Character, pp. xi-xvi, 1, 6-8, 13-23, 64-65, 78-79, 86-87, 96-97, 100-101, 104-105, and 120-121.

Morath, "Pamplona Bullfight," and Smith, "A Country Doctor." In Boot, Magnum Stories.

"Spanish Village." pp. 72-81 in Time - Photojournalism.

11 Looking at pictures, thinking about photography

Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," and Manovich, "The Paradoxes of Digital Photography." In Wells, The Photography Reader.

Sontag, "In Plato's Cave." In On Photography.

Malcolm, "Certainties and Possibilities."

Collins, Lauren. "Pixel Perfect." The New Yorker, May 12, 2008.

12 War and suffering in the picture Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, all.

Text Sources

Amir, Michlean J. "From Memorial Books to Invaluable Historical Documentation." In Wolfson, Laurel, and Barbara Leff. Proceedings of the 36th Annual Convention of the Association of Jewish Libraries. La Jolla, CA: AJL, 2001. (This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader.PDF)

Buy at Amazon Banks, Marcus. Visual Methods in Social Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001. ISBN: 9780761963646.

Bateson, Gregory, and Margaret Mead. Balinese Character. New York, NY: New York Academy of Sciences, 1942.

Buy at Amazon Boot, Chris. Magnum Stories. New York, NY: Phaidon, 2004. ISBN: 9780714842455.

Buy at Amazon Chéroux, Clement, et al. The Perfect Medium. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780300111361.

Buy at Amazon Collier, John, Jr., and Malcolm Collier. Visual Anthropology. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico, 1986. ISBN: 9780826308993.

Buy at Amazon Dunaway, Finis. Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780226173269.

Buy at Amazon Edwards, Elizabeth. Anthropology and Photography, 1860-1920. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. ISBN: 9780300059441.

Buy at Amazon Edwards, Steve. Photography: A Very Short Introduction. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. ISBN: 9780192801647.

Buy at Amazon Ferrato, Donna. "Living with the Enemy: Domestic Violence." In Light, Ken. Witness in Our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000. ISBN: 9781560989486.

Buy at Amazon  Fleischhauer, Carl, and Beverly Brannan. Documenting America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988. ISBN: 9780520062214.

Buy at Amazon Frizot, Michel. A New History of Photography. Köln, Germany: Könemann, 1998. ISBN: 9783829013284.

Buy at Amazon Goffman, Erving. Gender Advertisements. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. ISBN: 9780674341913.

Buy at Amazon Goldberg, Vicki. "Documenting Poverty." In Light Matters: Writings on Photography. New York, NY: Aperture, 2005. ISBN: 9781931788632.

Buy at Amazon Guimond, James. American Photography and the American Dream. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. ISBN: 9780807843086.

Buy at Amazon Hamilton, Peter, and Roger Hargreaves. The Beautiful and the Damned: The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Photography. Burlington, VT: Lund Humphries, 2001. ISBN: 9780853318217.

Buy at Amazon Harvey, John. Photography and Spirit. London, England: Reaktion Press, 2007. ISBN: 9781861893246.

Buy at Amazon Kemp, Martin. "'A Perfect and Faithful Record': Mind and Body in Medical Photography Before 1900." Chapter 5 in Thomas, Ann. Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780300073409.

Buy at Amazon King, David. The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 1997. ISBN: 9780805052947.

Kristof, Nicholas D. "Save the Darfur Puppy." New York Times, May 10, 2007.

Buy at Amazon Kuhn, Annette. "Remembrance." In Illuminations: Women Writing on Photography from the 1850s to the Present. Edited by Liz Heron and Val Williams. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. ISBN: 9780822317845.

Lange, Dorothea, and Paul Taylor. An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969.

Buy at Amazon Lenman, Robin. The Oxford Companion to the Photograph. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780198662716.

Buy at Amazon Levi-Strauss, David. "The Documentary Debate," and "Photography and Propaganda." In Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography. New York, NY: Aperture, 2005. ISBN: 9781931788106.

Buy at Amazon Malcolm, Janet. "Certainties and Possibilities." In Diana & Nikon: Essays on Photography. New York, NY: Aperture, 1997. ISBN: 9780893817275.

Buy at Amazon Marien, Mary Warner. Photography: A Cultural History. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006. ISBN: 9780132219068.

Buy at Amazon Mitchell, Timothy. "Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order." In Colonialism and Culture. Edited by Nicholas Dirks. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992. ISBN: 9780472094349.

Buy at MIT Press Buy at Amazon Parker, Ann, and Avon Neal. Los Ambulantes: Itinerant Photographers of Guatemala. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984. ISBN: 9780262660532.

Buy at Amazon Pink, Sarah. Doing Visual Ethnography. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001. ISBN: 9780761960546.

Severson, Kim. "Upton Sinclair, Now Playing on YouTube." New York Times, March 12, 2008.

Buy at Amazon Sontag, Susan. "In Plato's Cave." In On Photography. New York, NY: Picador, 2001. ISBN: 9780312420093.

Buy at Amazon ———. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York, NY: Picador, 2004. ISBN: 9780312422196.

Buy at Amazon Sprague, Stephen. "Yoruba Photography: How the Yoruba See Themselves." In Pinney, Christopher, and Nicolas Peterson. Photography's Other Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780822331261.

Time Life Library of Photography - Photojournalism. New York, NY: Time-Life Books, 1971.

Timmons, Heather, and J. Adam Huggins. "New York Manhole Covers, Forged Barefoot in India." New York Times, November 26, 2007.

Buy at Amazon Trachtenberg, Alan. "Illustrious Americans." Chapter 1 in Reading American Photographs. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1990. ISBN: 9780374522490.

Buy at Amazon Wells, Liz. The Photography Reader. New York, NY: Routledge, 2002. ISBN: 9780415246613.

Buy at Amazon Wells, Samuel. New Physiognomy or Signs of Character as Manifested through Temperament. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, LLC, 2007. ISBN: 9780548001523.

Buy at Amazon Wright, Richard. 12 Million Black Voices. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2002. ISBN: 9781560254461.