Undergraduate Course: Picturing Power: Black Photographers and Photographic Histories in USA 1845-1945 (HIAR10215)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh College of Art |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course introduces students to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Black photographers and their photographic histories, traditions, and practices. During this 100-year period, African American photographers and their subjects reply on the photograph as, in Sojourner Truth's words, a 'substance' to represent their 'shadow' and on the camera as a "weapon against poverty, racism and discrimination' (Gordon Parks). Students will study anti-white supremacist and anti-racist experimental formal strategies and innovative thematic agendas pioneered by Black artists over the centuries. Their groundbreaking photographic process is "a power" (Frederick Douglass) in the ever-present fight to safeguard, protect, and honour Black liberationist strategies and legacies. |
| Course description |
This course introduces students to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Black photographers working in the USA from 1845 until 1945 who are all committed to using the camera as a vehicle of protest against the 'caricatures of our faces' (Frederick Douglass) and as "a weapon against poverty, racism and discrimination" (Gordon Parks). Black artist-activist-liberator, Sojourner Truth wrote on all her photographs, 'I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance' in her powerful declaration of the reclamatory, representational, and revisionist power of photography as a mechanism of Black economic survival, social justice protest, personal self-fashioning, individual expression, and radical political activism. Working against a centuries long backdrop of U.S. histories of enslavement, racist prejudice and persecution, segregation, and lynchlaw, and an unending struggle for equal civil, moral, social, and political rights that continues to the present day, Black photographers have and continue to develop formal and thematic strategies in their photography in which they resist, defy, and defeat white supremacist dominant iconographic that work to make invisible, distort, disrespect, dehumanize, and deny Black bodies, histories, memories, and narratives over the centuries.
This course will introduce students to the photographs and photographic practices endorsed by Black artists in order to research their aesthetic forms, narrative practices, storytelling traditions, and self-representational agendas. We will examine the ways in which Black photographers pioneer experimental practices across their daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, albumen prints, cartes-de-visites, chromolithographs, and roll film, and ranging across the genres of portrait, landscape, street, event, political campaign, and social justice photography in their fight against white supremacy and white racism. Over the centuries, they hold themselves accountable to their united conviction that "pictures are a power" (Frederick Douglass).
The course will be taught through a series of ten, weekly 2-hour seminar discussions. Students will be expected to prepare for class by completing the required reading (typically 2-4 articles or book chapters each week). In class, students will be asked to participate in general discussion of the readings and the images which we will look at together.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
| Additional Costs | This Course does not require any additional costs to be met by the Student.
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Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Through critical discussion, demonstrate knowledge and understanding concerning the self-representational formal and thematic strategies at work within Black photography and photographic traditions in the USA from 1845 until 1945.
- Apply appropriate skills and techniques to evaluate a range of primary and secondary sources, including both visual and textual materials.
- Analyse photographs in relation to their historical context and relevant critical debates.
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Reading List
Jenkins, Earnestine L. Race, Representation and Photography in Nineteenth-Century Memphis. Routledge, 2016.
Raiford, Leigh. Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle. University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
Sealy, Mark and Teju Cole. As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic. Aperture, 2021.
Wallace, Maurice O. and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds. Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity. Duke University Press, 2012.
Willis, Deborah. Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present. W. W. Norton, 2000. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Personal and Intellectual Autonomy: This course will help students to develop their abilities as critical and reflective thinkers, by asking them to analyse and evaluate the arguments put forward in experimental photographic creation and production; and to consider the place of art-historical arguments in relation to wider social, cultural and political contexts of African American photography and photographical traditions.
Research and Enquiry: The course will help students develop their abilities as creative problem-solvers and researchers, by asking them to explore the application of ideas and arguments to specific examples of artistic works and theoretical writings and, and to develop convincing interpretations, arguments and proposals of their own.
Communication: The course will help students develop their skills as effective communicators, in written form, through the coursework essay, as well as in spoken form through class discussion. The emphasis on seminar class discussion will help students develop their skills as effective communicators, through listening to and engaging with others' ideas and working constructively through group discussion to develop new understanding.
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| Special Arrangements |
Where there is an option, PGT students must take the level 11 course Battleground: Nineteenth-, Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century African American Portraitures. |
| Keywords | Photography,Liberation,Anti Racism,Witnessing,Self-Fashioning |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Prof Celeste-Marie Bernier
Tel: (0131 6)50 4114
Email: Celeste-Marie.Bernier@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | |
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