This course is designed to provide a sound basis for understanding the ways that images communicate, both in terms of how they are made and how they are read. Now and for the foreseeable future, all manner of information — scientific animation, humanistic data, economic graphs, aesthetic coding – is being conveyed in visual terms. Students in this course will question what constitutes an image, how images inform, and to what extent they succeed outside of language. The course will be taught by three professors in three distinct but overlapping sessions, which will address visual documentation, pictogrammatic speech, and visual narrative.
Sample reading list:
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity…
Kaja Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy, or the History of Photography Part 1
Theodor Adorno, How To Watch Television
Douglas Crimp, Pictures
Kara Walker, My Compliment, My Enemy, My Opressor, My Love
Devin Fore, Realism After Modernism
Reading/Writing assignments:
Reading and discussing three scholarly articles required, two optional.
