Look Again: New Approaches to the History of Photography

with Christopher B. Steiner, Ph.D.
Lucy C. McDannel ‘22 Professor of Art History and Anthropology, Connecticut College

$75 (Members 10% Discount); Participants choosing to attend the optional March 20 in-person visit to the Lyman Allyn Art Museum will pay a $10 group visit fee separately

Each week this short course, presented via ZOOM, will explore new approaches to the history of photography by moving beyond the usual “greatest hits” to explore the medium’s overlooked practitioners and its entanglements in our everyday life. Together these sessions offer a fresh, critical, and innovative way to understand photography’s past and its ongoing power in the contemporary world.

We begin by examining the multiple inventions of photography, from its technological origins in Europe in the 1830s to its “invented” assimilation into the history of art beginning in the United States a century later. 

From there we examine the ethics and politics of documentary photography by exploring the works of well-known photographers like Jacob Riis and Dorothea Lang, as well as the unknown men and women who chronicled with their camera the peoples and cultures of their own communities.

In our third class session we dive into the uncanny world of spirit photography and so-called “hidden mother” portraits, as we consider ways in which photography can capture both the visible and the invisible. 

Then we turn to the rich terrain of “vernacular” or amateur photography, asking what our family snapshots and anonymous albums reveal about ourselves and social life? 

Finally, we conclude by looking at the fascinating intersection between photography and painting, highlighting the ways in which the two mediums have overlapped and complemented each other – through painted backdrops in studio portraiture; painted foregrounds in arcade or carnival photography; and the painted photograph itself, images enhanced, tinted or entirely transformed by the application of pigment and paint.

An extra optional bonus session will be offered on March 20 to take a guided tour of Photography and the Painted Image at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, an exhibition curated by Christopher Steiner and students in his class AHI 250: Perspectives on Photography.

FEB 13: The Inventions of Photography
FEB 20: Documentary Photography: Insiders vs. Outsiders
FEB 27: Spooky Stuff: Spirit Photography and Hidden Mothers
MARCH 6: What About My Snapshots? Exploring Vernacular Photography
MARCH 13: Photography and the Painted Image
MARCH 20: Bonus Session: optional visit to the Lyman Allyn Art Museum to see Photography and the Painted Image