Photography is a conduit for power, influencing our formations of citizenship, acting as surveillance, creating normative representations, and providing tools for the constitution of the self. Photography is also used to observe and critique the world, and to counter dominant histories and assumptions. In this course, you will explore how photography can be used to study the often-invisible forces and systems that govern daily life, shape desires, and design our worlds.
You will explore photography’s complex relationship to power; both the way it is implicated in maintaining regimes of power and how it is used to counter them. Lectures, readings and discussions will introduce you to photography’s relationship to imperialism, colonial expansion, surveillance, and consumerism. Workshops will support you engage critically with analogue, digital and emerging technologies to understand the relationship between the apparatus, the image and culture.
