ARTH 3600 - The History of Photography

This course traces the different directions photography has taken since its inception. Using the social and cultural environment as a context and focus, the ever-increasing use by artists of photography from the camera obscura to the present will be examined. Photography’s invention would change the role of the artists from the 19th- through 21st-centuries. Course lectures will cover the many uses of photography including its rise as a separate art form and how it has changed our perceptions of the world. In the 21st-century, photographs have become a discreet language of signs, symbols, and metaphors with implied narratives.