Feeling Photography
Course Description
Summary
How do we read images? How do they act on us? What do they ask us to do––to feel? In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes illuminates a crucial link between feeling and photography, positioning “affective intentionality” at the heart of the medium. Through the careful study of image and text, in class experiments and group critique, students gain new insights into phenomenology, alterity, and ephemerality, offering a rich theoretical and sensory terrain to reimagine the complex relationship between images, power and subjects. Assignments support students in developing broader vocabulary for visual analysis, identifying inherited ways of seeing, and illuminating alternate modes of perception. By attending to feeling, photography emerges as a site where the haptic and optic coincide, offering a new approach to the construction of photographic meaning.
Learning Outcomes
- A final project consisting of photographs or imaged-based work that engages the felt dimensions of aesthetic experience.
- A demonstrated comprehension of affect theory, the tactile nature of photographs, the relation of photography to sentiment and intimacy, and the ways that affect pervades the photographic archive.
- Develop skills in close looking, building a broader formal and theoretical vocabulary for visual analysis.
- Focused practice with inclusive classroom conversation, particularly concerning the discussion of classmates' artwork during critique and responding to assigned texts.
- Recognize shared role in cultivating an engaging, respectful, and productive learning community