Prof. Julia Adeney Thomas
History 30986
Spring 2012
University of Notre Dame
Photography as History: Personal and Political
Photographs are so much a part of our lives that we often fail to wonder at them or think about how
we use them. This course explores photography’s alliance (and tension) with histories both personal
and political. We begin by considering photography as a private medium, a treasury of personal
memories and a mode of self-exploration. We look at family photographs, trying to understand
what we are doing when we collect these. As we will find in reading works such as Roland Barthes’s
Camera Lucida, the photograph’s value for us personally rests on ontological assumptions as to the
nature of the medium and its relationship with reality, time, and society. After exploring a number
of texts that start with the premise that photography is primarily a personal and private practice, the
class will then turn to reading about photography as a public medium, to the political histories it tells
and the historical interventions it tries to make. This second half of the course explores
photography’s relationship with power and with the state.
Overall, the central, guiding question of this course is how photography is used to substantiate and
create histories of individuals and of societies. Readings and images will circle the globe from
France, Germany and America to Israel and Brazil.
Books
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Translated by Richard Howard, (Hill and
Wang, FSG, 1981).
Jane Gallop and Dick Blau, Living with his Camera (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2003)
Linda Haverty Rugg, Picturing Ourselves, (Chicago, 1997)
Jay Prosseur, Light in the Dark Room: Photograph and Loss (Minnesota, 2005)
Lili Corbus Bezner, Photography and Politics in America: From the New Deal into the Cold War (John
Hopkins, 1999)
John Tagg, The Burden of Representation (University of Minnesota Press, 1993)
Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008)
Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (University of Chicago Press, 2010)
Essays
Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography”
David Crew on “Visual Power? The Politics of Images in Twentieth-Century Germany and Austria-
Hungary” (German History, 27:2, April 2009, 272-85)
Paul Betts, “Picturing Privacy,” Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (Oxford,
2010) introduction, and 193-226.
Josie McLelland, “Visual Dangers and Delights: Nude Photography in East Germany,” Past and
Present, no. 205 (November 2009)
Lili Corbus Bezner, Photography and Politics in America: From the New Deal into the Cold War
“Introduction: What is Documentary Photography?” pp 1-15.