ENGL 12
Looking at Contemporary Documentary Photography
Last Offered Winter 2009
Division I
Cross-listed SPEC 27 / ARTH 12
This course is not offered in the current catalog

This course explores the evolution of modern documentary photography. We will start with Robert Frank’s The Americans, and how Frank’s singular vision deeply shaped the next generation of photographers working the American streets and landscape. Diane Arbus, Bruce Davidson, Lee Freidlander, William Klein, Danny Lyon, Gary Winogrand are some of the photographers whose work we will get to know well. Discussions will include the new wave of independent and Magnum photojournalists (Phillip Jones Griffiths, Josef Koudleka, Susan Meiselas, Gilles Peress, James Nachtwey, Alex Webb, Ron Haviv and Tyler Hicks) and the wars from Vietnam to Bosnia to Iraq they cover as well as the personal visions they explore. Insight into the diverse currents of documentary photography will be covered through the work of Bill Burke, Larry Clark, Larry Fink, Nan Goldin, Emmet Gowin, Sally Mann, Mary Ellen Mark, Nicholas Nixon , Richard Misrach, Joel Sternfeld, Edward Burtynsky, Laura Letinsky and Simon Norfolk. The class will meet three mornings a week for two hours. Slide presentations will occupy half of the first meetings and give way to discussion of isssues in documentary photography. Students will be encouraged to work on individual projects of their own choice. A field trip to New York will let us see first hand works from the collections at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and the International Center of Photography.