This course offers an exploration of conceptual practices and strategies in the field of fine art photography and related media as reflecting personal and collective attitudes, social contexts, and aesthetics in visual culture. Students will become familiar with the various pivotal movements, collectives, artworks and contexts that define the field of conceptual photographic practice. We will gain a deeper understanding of relevant historic and contemporary work through online readings, lectures, artist talks, text, exhibitions and installations and learn to apply original ideas to assigned projects, research presentations, and group critiques. Topics include performance, artist books and zines, constructed images, poetics, film and video and digital formats, among others. The course encourages concept-driven experimentation and expanded photographic techniques with a focus on process and ideation.

This section of Core Lab 4 investigates the professional and practical experiences of editing and publishing strategies for pictures in various modalities. Students will work to develop a professional visual style and sensibility in respect to various nexus of context. Students will learn to edit their own work for photo editors, agencies, galleries as well as independent established book publishers. The professional practice will be informed by an in-depth look into the history of and current practices within an evolving field of publishing strategies in context.

This course is part of a suite of electives designed around major concepts in the field of contemporary photography. It offers an exploration of the archive as a document in contemporary art. Almost from its inception the photograph was perceived as a form of currency in a closed system. As currency the photograph ascribed value by quantifying things, emphasizing their similarity and difference to other things. These systems attempt to give meaning and coherence through the division between self and other, healthy and diseased, normal and pathological. By reclaiming the archive we can shift the perspective away from dominant narratives, and reimagine the past in order to conceive new possibilities for the future. In this class we will look at the ways artists (Carrie Mae Weems, Carmen Winant, and Arthur Jafa among others) have challenged and repurposed archives. We will consider writings by Okwui Enwezor, Allen Sekula and Ariella Azoulay’s theories on the hierarchical (and imperialistic) ordering of things. Students will research and work with archives from family photographs to found institutional and commercial archives. Using text, sequence and editing they will make new configurations changing the initial meaning or value. The final project will be a print on demand book re-contextualizing their displaced and fugitive archive with new meaning.

This course is part of a suite of electives designed around strategies employed in the field of contemporary photography. This elective will focus primarily on exposure to and research of existing practices in Editorial Fashion and Still life photography. It will emphasize development of a repeatable set of approaches that established artists have used to produce a consistent and dependable working practice. From a visual standpoint, Fashion and Still Life are characterized by a strong understanding of and attention to detail and surface material. Given the virtual nature of this course, students will focus on ways to make photographs as aesthetically alluring with the tools and materials at hand. From a practical standpoint, Fashion and Still Life are characterized by collaboration and pre-existing parameters. Students are encouraged to bring their own sensibilities, taste, and personalities to each assignment while also remaining flexible enough to understand the potential needs of a client, editor, or patron. The course encourages exploration into how Fashion and Still life reinforce existing cultural models and how they can be used to encourage new ones. At the end of this course, students will have the knowledge to reference multiple styles and the ability to confidently apply their own in a working environment.