Women's Camera Work
Mondays, 1-3:50, in Art 221

Office Hour

Mondays, 4-5, in Art 209, and by appointment

Course Description

In case studies, this seminar explores the directions women pushed photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. How did women view and manage the proposals of early modernist photography? How did they interpret the social documentary? How did "being a woman" structure or facilitate their ideas? In addition to addressing these and other questions, this seminar meditates on the interpretive tools we use to answer them, and it is therefore also a seminar about theory and methods. The seminar ends with a long consideration of the work of Diane Arbus, who is the subject of a major exhibition at our Museum during the semester.

Books and Reader

Required:
Judith Davidov, Women's Camera Work (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), available at Odyssey.
Anthony W. Lee and John Pultz, Diane Arbus: Family Albums (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), available at the Art Museum.
Naomi Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers (New York and London: Abbeville Press, 2000, 2nd edition), available at Odyssey.
Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), available at Odyssey
A course reader, available at the main office of the Art and Art History department.

Recommended:
Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1984).
Diane Arbus and Doon Arbus, Diane Arbus: Revelations (New York: Random House, 2003).

Course Requirements

Regular attendance and active participation in the seminars, successful completion of the midterm examination, a presentation of the research project, and a final paper. The final grade will be measured as follows: active participation (1/3), midterm (1/3), presentation and final paper (1/3).

Schedule and Readings

Sept 8 Introduction

Sept 15 A Question of Gender
Hume, "Our Idea of Identity," "Of Personal Identity," and "Second Thoughts" (reader)
Riley, "Does a Sex Have a History?" (reader)
Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (reader)
Amico site: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/lits/library/ref/images.shtml

Sept 18 Lecture:
John Szarkowski, "Diane Arbus as a Photographer"
Gamble Auditorium, 7 pm

Sept 22 The Professional Photographer: Frances Benjamin Johnston, et. al.
Wexler, "What a Woman Can Do with a Camera," 15-51; "Black and White and Color," 127-176.
Davidov, "Containment and Excess: Representing African Americans," 157-214.
Rosenblum, "At the Beginning," 39-53; "Not Just For Fun: Women Become Professionals, 1880-1915," 55-71.

Sept 25 Gallery Talk:
Jerome Liebling, "Diane Arbus at the Five Colleges, 1971"
Art Museum, Weissman Gallery, 4 pm

Sept 29 Portraiture and Genre: Alice Austen and Gertrude Käsebier
Wexler, "The Domestic Unconscious," 209-261.
Davidov, "The Geometry of Bodies: Gender and Genre in Pictorialist Photography," 45-101.
Rosenblum, "Portraiture, 1890-1915," 73-91; "Art and Recreation: Pleasures of the Amateur," 93-113.

Oct 2 Gallery Talk:
John Pultz, "Searching for Diane Arbus's 'Family Album'"
Art Museum, Weissman Gallery, 4 pm

Oct 6 Landscapes, Nature Studies, and Nudes: Immogen Cunningham, Tina Modotti, and the Modernists
Davidov, "The Body's Geography: Female Versions of Landscape," 295- 375.
Armstrong, "This Photography Which is Not One: In the Gray Zone with Tina Modotti" (reader)
Solomon-Godeau, "Reconsidering Erotic Photography: Notes for a Project of Historical Salvage" (reader)
Solomon-Godeau, "Just Like a Woman" (reader)

Oct 13 No class, mid-semester break

Oct 16 Gallery Talk:
Sandra Matthews, "Family Portraits and Fascination"
Art Museum, Weissman Gallery, 4 pm

Oct 20 Documentary and Social Concern: Dorothea Lange
Davidov, "The Only Gentile among the Jews: Dorothea Lange's Documentary Photography," 215-293.
Rosenblum, "Photography Between the Wars: North America, 1920-40," 149-179; "Photography as Information, 1940-2000," 181-241.

Oct 23 Lecture:
Laura Wexler, "Making Arbus Strange: History, Time, and Memory in the Arbus Archive"
Gamble Auditorium, 7 pm

Oct 27 Midterm examinations

Nov 3 Midterm examinations

Nov 10 Arbus: Introduction and Early Criticism
Arbus, quotes from Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (reader)
Sontag, "America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly" (reader)
Jeffrey, "Diane Arbus and the Past: When She Was Good" (reader)
Southall, "The Magazine Years, 1960-1971" (reader)

Nov 17 Arbus: Recent Criticism
Adams, "Freak Photography" (reader)
Armstrong, "Biology, Destiny, Photography: Difference According to Diane Arbus" (reader)
Lee and Pultz, Diane Arbus: Family Albums

Nov 24 No Class

Dec 1 Presentations

Dec 8 Presentations