Learning outcomes
The development of students’ knowledge and critical abilities in relation to the contemporary theoretical reason for photography developed in the context of Cultural Studies and Humanities
- Focus on the critical thinking required to understand the photographic production practice
- Developing skills for independent and personal learning
- Understanding the necessity of research and the inherent specificities of different methods for producing theoretical and art work.
- Ability to think and create structured concepts
- Ability to produce a series of photographs that conceptually and stylistically associated
- Ability to critically analyze the working process and the final results. Critical support of the project and its presentation
- Osmosis in a rich, varied, challenging and experimental production of photo albums
General Competences
- Research, analyze and synthesize data and information, using the necessary technologies
- Adapt to new situations
- Decision making
- Autonomous work
- Teamwork
- Working in an international environment
- Exercise of criticism and self-criticism
- Project design and management
- Respect for diversity and multiculturalism
- Showing social, professional and ethical responsibility and sensitivity to gender issues
- Promote free, creative and inductive thinking
Course Outline
Lectures
- Post modernism critical practices in photography (Appropriation, Imitation, Parody)
- The hyper-reality concept and the simulation degrees (Jean Baudrillard)
- Photography and globalization:
- The study of photographers theme change: the everyday and social clash
- The relationship of Information and Aesthetic Pleasure
- The issue of locality and homogenization in photography
- The viewer as participant in the artist’s work
- Capital cities and peripheries: the photographic representation of changes that globalization brings to cities
- The condition of voyeurism and surveillance in photography:
- The photographer as voyeur
- Voyeurism and desire
- Celebrities and the public eye (paparazzi photography)
- Surveillance
- Photography and social identity: the genre of portraiture and its relationship to documentary photography today
- Forms of narration in documentary photography today:
- Narrative creation influenced by other forms of representation.
- Webdocumentaries
PRACTICAL PART
The first direction of the practical part aims at developing a photographic series representing the urban and suburban landscape. The body of work will also focus on exploring photography’s expressive and conceptual possibilities through the selection and development of a specific theme.
The photographic approach includes as an option the objective recording in a form of research (study of the changes in urban and suburban landscape) or even the setting up of a fictional landscape. As a proposal there could be the landscape approach through the antithesis and the dialogue of large categories such as cultural and natural, organic and inorganic, old and contemporary.
The second direction aims at developing a new way of approaching the art documentary through established genres such as portraiture and landscape and also developing new ways of presenting the final work.
RECOMMENDED BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Angier, R., Train Your Gaze – A Practical and Theoretical Introduction to Portrait Photography, Fairchild Books, 2015.
- Bate, D., Photography – Key Concepts, Berg, 2009.
- Bright, Susan, Art Photography Now, Thames and Hudson, 2011.
- Bright, Susan, Auto Focus: The Self-Portrait in Contemporary Photography, 2010.
- Calvino Italo, Invisible Cities, Penguin, 1972.
- Cotton, C., The Photograph as Contemporary Art, London: Thames and Hudson, 2004.
- Coverley Merlin, Psychogeography, Pocket Essentials, 2006.
- Ewing, William, Face: The New Photographic Portrait, Thames and Hudson, 2008.
- Stilgoe R. John, Outside Lies Magic, 1998.
- Tormey Jane, Cities and Photography, Routledge, 2013.