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Capturing the Visual World: Photographic Reproduction from Daguerreotype to Digital Culture, Art, and Technology 1 (CAT 1)

Sixth College

Prof. Kelly Gates Department of Communication, Science Studies Program, and Critical Gender Studies

Email: kagates@ucsd.edu (“CAT 1” in subject line) Office: MCC 125B Office Hrs: Tues-Wed 2:15pm-3:15pm

Lectures: Tues-Thurs 12:30-1:50, CENTER 212

COURSE DESCRIPTION In the twenty-first century, how do we shape the world, and how does the world shape us? One would be hard-pressed to answer this question without some attention to photography and other visual media technologies. Today, photographic technologies are everywhere: on our personal devices, in our homes and workplaces, in public spaces, courtrooms, medical examining rooms and scientific laboratories, in newsrooms and creative production, and many other settings. The transition from film to digital in all of these domains gives us occasion to reflect anew on the significance of photography – both as a social practice in its own right, and as a technology that plays a fundamental role in a wide variety of other institutions and practices. The aim of this course is to explore the ways photographic media help shape the way human beings see and make sense of the world. Rather than treating it as an isolated technology, we will examine photography as a set of diverse cultural and institutional practices, and as a set of technologies that modern societies have used to tell stories about themselves and make particular claims about truth and reality. We will focus less on the technical and aesthetic dimensions of photography and more on its social uses and cultural meanings, as well as how those uses and meanings have changed (and stayed the same) over time. We will give special attention to personal uses of photography, the introduction of photographic evidence in the legal system, scientific uses of photography, issues of photographic truth and photo manipulation, the rise of photojournalism, the advent of motion pictures, and finally, photography and consumer culture. Rather than imposing a linear sequence on these topics, we will move back and forth between the present and the past as a way of examining how digital technologies are “remediating” earlier photographic forms and practices. Our goal is to gain a deeper understanding of the ways that photography is used – and how each of us uses it – to shape how we see the world and our places within it.

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ASSESSMENT

Final grades for the course will be based on participation in section discussions (15%), three 2-page writing assignments (10% each), a 6-8-page exhibition catalog entry (20%), quizzes (15% total), and a final (20%). Please see the course schedule below for writing assignment due dates.

REQUIRED READINGS The required readings for the course are compiled in a course packet available at A.S. Soft Reserves, located on campus at Student Center A. You can access the articles assigned for the first 2 weeks of class on Ted/WebCT, giving you ample time to purchase the course packet. Follow the reading schedule outlined below, completing the readings on the date they are listed.

READING SCHEDULE Sept 22 Introduction to the course Sept 27 Looking at images

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, “Practices of Looking: Images, Power, and Politics,” in Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford University Press, 2005): 10-44.

Sept 29 Photographs as texts Derrick Price and Liz Wells, “Case Study: Image analysis: the example of Migrant Mother.” In

Photography: A Critical Introduction. 2nd Edition (Routledge, 2000): 35-45. Oct 4 Photography as practice

Susan Sontag, “On Photography,” in Crowley & Heyer, eds. Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society. 4th Edition. (Allyn and Bacon, 2003): 166-170. [This is an excerpted version of a longer essay by Sontag, first published 1973 in On Photography.]

Lisa Gye, “Picture This: The Impact of Mobile Camera Phones on Personal Photographic Practices,” Continuum 21:2 (2007) 279-288.

Oct 6 Photography as technology

Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium is the Message,” in Understanding Media: The Extension of Man (MIT Press, 1994): 7-21. [Originally published 1964]

Mark Federman, “What is the Meaning of The Medium is the Message?” July 23, 2004, http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm

Oct 11 Brian Winston, “How are media born?” 1990. http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/WINSTON.html

WRITING ASSIGNMENT 1 DUE: Article summary

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Oct 13 Looking back: Image capture before photography & the invention of photography

Beaumont Newhall, “The Elusive Image” and “Invention,” in The History of Photography (Museum of Modern Art, 1982): 8-11; 13-25.

Oct 18 The importance of portraits

Naomi Rosenblum, “A Plentitude of Portraits, 1839-1890,” in A World History of Photography, 4th Edition (Abbeville, 2007): 38-78. Charles Baudelaire, “Photography” (written in 1859), in Beaumont Newhall, ed. Photography: Essays and Images (Museum of Modern Art, New York: 1980): 112-113.

Oct 20 Jeffrey Hancock and Catalina Toma, “Putting Your Best Face Forward: The Accuracy of Online

Dating Photographs,” Journal of Communication 59 (2009): 367-386. Oct 25 Photographic evidence and the legal system

Jennifer Mnookin, “The Image of Truth: Photographic Evidence and the Power of Analogy,” [Parts I & II] Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities (Winter 1998): 1-43 [pp. 1-17 of web document.]

Oct 27 Photographic evidence and science

Jennifer Tucker, “The Social Photographic Eye,” in Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900. Corey Keller, ed. (SF MOMA & Yale U. Press, 2008): 37-50.

WRITING ASSIGNMENT 2 DUE: Exegesis

Nov 1 Back to the future: Digital photography, photo manipulation, and photographic evidence

Hany Farid, “Digital Image Forensics,” Scientific American (June 2008): 66-71. Nov 3 Is photographic truth dead?

Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, “Digital Photography,” in Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 105-112.

Recommended: Lev Manovich, “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography,” 1995.

http://www.manovich.net/TEXT/digital_photo.html Nov 8 The death and birth of photojournalism

David Jolly, “Lament for a dying field,” The New York Times, August 9, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/business/media/10photo.html

Ulrich Keller, “Early Photojournalism,” in Crowley & Heyer, eds. Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society. 5th Edition. (Allyn and Bacon, 2006): 161-168.

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Nov 10 Photography and history / photography and war

Matt Crawford, “Introduction: The Spanish Civil War and War Photography in the 1930s.” http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/swphotojournalism/ Recommended: Susan Sontag, “Looking at War: Photography’s View of Devastation and Death,” The New Yorker, December 9, 2002. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/12/09/021209crat_atlarge

Nov 15 The photographic archive as text, practice, and technology

Alan Sekula, “Reading an archive,” in Mining Photographs and Other Pictures, 1948-1968, Buchloh & Wilkie, eds. (Nova Scotia College of Art & Design): 193-202.

Michelle Slatalla, “Have Camera, Will Shoot, and Shoot,” The New York Times, May 28, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/fashion/28spy.html.

WRITING ASSIGNMENT 3 DUE: Concept application Nov 17 Motion pictures

S.F. Spira, “The Moving Image,” in The History of Photography as Seen through the Spira Collection (Aperture): 182-195. Daniel Czitrom, “Early Motion Pictures,” in Crowley & Heyer, eds. Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society. 4th Edition. (Allyn and Bacon, 2003): 176-183.

Nov 22 Lev Manovich, “What is Digital Cinema?” in The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2002)

http://www.manovich.net/TEXT/digital-cinema.html Nov 24 NO CLASS – Happy Thanksgiving! Nov 29 Photography and consumer culture

Elspeth H. Brown, “Rationalizing Consumption: Lejaren à Hiller and the Origins of Advertising Photography, 1913-1924,” Enterprise and Society 1 (December 2000): 715-738.

Dec 1 Lauren Collins, “Pixel Perfect: Pascal Dangin’s Virtual Reality,” The New Yorker (May 12, 2008) http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_collins

FINAL WRITING ASSIGNMENT DUE: Exhibition catalog entry Dec 9 Final Exam 11:30am-2:30pm

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ASSIGNMENT SUBMISSIONS POLICY All assignments must be submitted in writing by the day and time specified in the Syllabus, above. Additionally, all assignments must also be submitted digitally via turnitin.com by midnight of the day in which they are due. All graded writing must be submitted to Turnitin.com to receive credit. Late submissions will be penalized. If an assignment is not time stamped in Turnitin.com by midnight on the date it is due, it will be reduced by one full grade (i.e.: An A would be lowered to a B). Papers not submitted to turnitin.com by the time of the final exam will be lowered two full grades (i.e.: An A would be lowered to a C). If you have an emergency and you discuss it with your TA before the deadline, it may be possible to make arrangements but this is not guaranteed. By university policy, the final exam will not be accepted late. You must submit all assigned work to pass the course. STUDENTS WITH SPECIAL NEEDS Students with physical or learning disabilities must work with UCSD’s Office for Students with Disabilities to obtain current documentation, then contact instructor and TA’s to arrange appropriate academic accommodations. For pre-existing needs this should be accomplished in the first two weeks of the quarter; for emerging needs do it as soon in the quarter as possible. To be fair to all students, no individual accommodations will be made unless the student first presents the proper documentation. ELECTRONIC DEVICES AND COURSE PARTICIPATION Electronic devices, including laptops and cell phones, may only be used in class to the extent and for the purposes permitted by the course instructor. Please be aware that even when their use in lecture or discussion section is permitted, using these devices in ways which are distracting to other people in the room, irrelevant to the class, or counterproductive to learning is not acceptable. PARTICIPATION GRADES Here is a description of the kind of participation in the course that would earn you an A, B, C, etc. Your TA may use pluses and minuses to reflect your participation more exactly, but on this sheet we will simply show a general description for each letter grade. A – EXCELLENT. • You are always well prepared for discussion in lecture and for section, with almost no absences. You can explain each

reading in your own words. In addition, you have already asked yourself questions about what it means, focusing on specific passages that are interesting to you and making connections between various readings and ideas.

• You express your thoughts clearly and politely, making and supporting specific claims. You respond to what other students are saying in order to have a dialogue with them.

• You find ways to connect the course material with issues that matter to you personally. • You do all section activities with high energy and attention to detail, taking personal responsibility for achieving the

assigned goal. B – GOOD. • You attend lecture and section with few absences. You have done most of the preparation. If you don’t understand

the reading the first time you read it, you wait to have it explained by the TA. • You talk on a regular basis. Sometimes you offer well-thought-out ideas and connections, supported with evidence;

sometimes your contributions are merely a statement of opinions or initial reactions. • You do assigned activities willingly; but if you run into obstacles, you let the TA or someone else figure out how to

overcome those obstacles.

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C – SATISFACTORY. • You are present in lecture and section, with few absences, and have done some reading some of the time. • You occasionally contribute to the discussion; your contributions are more often opinions than thoughtful efforts to

make connections. You’re not a real self-starter, and you have to be nudged to participate. • You do activities when asked, because it’s required. D – UNSATISFACTORY. • You have multiple absences from section. • When you come, you’re often not very prepared, and you don’t say much. • You may have a habit of using your cell phone or computer in class to chat or do things not directly related to the

course. Playing online poker or shopping for surfboards in either lecture or section, for instance, would be ways to earn a “D” (or lower) in participation.

F—FAILING. • You have many absences, are habitually unprepared, or are uncooperative. ACADEMIC INTEGRITY You are expected to uphold the standards of academic integrity in all your work. All work that you submit for credit in CAT is expected to be your own original work, created specifically for this class. Where you are making appropriate use of the work of another person, which may include brief quotations, photographs or drawings, charts, special information, specific arguments, etc., you must credit the author of that work by using appropriate and complete citations. If you choose to include in your CAT assignments any data, information, argument or artwork that you have produced for another course, you should identify it as such with an appropriate self-citation, and it should in no way constitute the bulk of the assignment that you are submitting for credit in CAT. UCSD has a university-wide Policy on Integrity of Scholarship, which can be found online at http://www-senate.ucsd.edu/manual/appendices/app2.htm. All students must read and be familiar with this Policy. All suspected violations of academic integrity will be reported to UCSD’s Academic Integrity Coordinator. Students found to have violated UCSD’s standards for academic integrity may receive both administrative and academic sanctions. Administrative sanctions may extend up to and include suspension or dismissal, and academic sanctions may include failure of the assignment or failure of the course. Specific examples of prohibited violations of academic integrity include the following: (although this should in no way be considered an exhaustive list of examples): Academic stealing refers to the theft of exams or exam answers, of papers or take-home exams composed by others, and of research notes, computer files, or data collected by others. Academic cheating, collusion, and fraud refer to having others do your schoolwork or helping or allowing them to present your work as their own; using unauthorized materials during exams; inventing data or bibliography to support a paper, project, or exam; purchasing tests, answers, or papers from any source whatsoever; submitting (nearly) identical papers to two classes. Helping other students to cheat or steal is also cheating. Misrepresenting personal or family emergencies or health problems in order to extend deadlines and alter due dates or requirements is another form of academic fraud. Claiming you have been ill when you were not, claiming that a family member has been ill or has died when that is untrue are some examples of unacceptable ways of trying to gain more time than your fellow students have been allowed in which to complete assigned work. Please do not ask or allow friends or family members to write or substantially edit your work. That is both a violation of academic integrity and a short-circuiting of the learning process.

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Plagiarism refers to the use of another’s work without full acknowledgment, whether by suppressing the reference, neglecting to identify direct quotations, paraphrasing closely or at length without citing sources, spuriously identifying quotations or data, or cutting and pasting the work of several (usually unidentified) authors into a single undifferentiated whole. Receipt of this syllabus constitutes an acknowledgment that you are responsible for understanding and acting in accordance with UCSD guidelines on academic integrity.