ARTH 565
Changing American Landscape: 1865-1975 Spring 2015
Division I
This is not the current course catalog

This class will examine American landscape photography in its broadest sense, from photographs of national parks to street photography. We will begin in 1865, after the Civil War, and work our way up to postmodern photographic practices. Through lectures and discussions, we will examine the critical edges of the idea of American landscape: its precedents, its many iterations, and the reasons for its continued cultural presence. We will focus on the social, political, aesthetic, and environmental aspects of the images we encounter and consider their historical contexts. Photographers that we will discuss include Timothy O’Sullivan, Mathew Brady, Laura Gilpin, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Weegee, and New Topographics Photographers. Additionally, we will examine landscape photography’s relationship to literature through discussions of Willa Cather’s My Antonia, James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, among others. The aim of this course is twofold: to broaden your historical understanding of the history of landscape photography, and to critically engage with its discourse.