Scheme of Work FD Year 2 Photography Contextual Studies

FD Year 2 Photography Contextual Studies

Scheme of work

1 Surveillance and Society

To examine how different modes of photographic technology facilitate surveillance and how artists have used them as a vehicle for critical art practice.

Reading: Michel Foucault - Panopticism

2 Critical Positions on the Media

To examine the social function of documentary photography, as a form of mechanical reproduction historically and within contemporary globalised culture.

Reading: Walter Benjamin - The work of art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction

3 Film Theory, 'The Gaze' and Psychoanalysis

Consider how the gaze is reconstructed in Cindy Sherman's, and Merry Alpern's photography.

Reading: Rosalind Coward - The Look, and John Berger Ways of Seeing Chapter three.

4 Communication Theory

To examine how meaning is constructed in advertising imagery, and why these modes of representation were appropriated by artists such as Richard Prince and Jeff Koons in the 1980s.

Reading: Malcolm Barnard - The Sign

5 Reality Virtuality, Hyperreality

Objectivity in photography. Bernd and Hiller Becher, Thomas Ruff , and Thomas Demand. Contrasting photograph as index and simulacrum.

Reading: Jean Baudrillard - America

6 The Media Globalisation & Sustainability

The role of documentation in the representation of globalised space. Alan Sekula, Gabriel Orozco and Andreas Gursky.

Reading: David Harvey - Space as a Keyword

7 Review, and submission of blogs

Review themes from the lectures in recent work by Walead Beshty, Marlo Pascual, Jonathan Monk, Darren Almond, and Roe Ethridge. Students submit their completed blogs.