Reading & Composition

Capturing a moment—pinning it down while it struggles to live, and then holding it hostage, immobile, apparently subdued—sounds a little like hunting a butterfly: a fragile art.  It must require a balance of invention and preservation, and a steady hand, because outside of the frame of the picture, things are always changing.  The people in a silver-tinted photograph from Paris, a century ago, are all gone now, and the streets and buildings you see behind them have been demolished or renovated beyond recognition.  The historical present never stays still:  what happened to that sailor kissing that nurse in Times Square, celebrating the end of WWII, or those empty-eyed women of the Depression who stood with their rough hands square on their bony hips, looking straight back at the camera, or those strung-out caricatures that populate Andy Warhol’s ‘Screen Tests?’ What happened in those moments, when the camera caught them and made them into flat images?

A snapshot may be a spontaneous moment, arrested by the photographer as if by the police. A snapshot may be a picture of what you love about someone—an adorable squint in the sun, a particular half-smile, a way of tilting one’s head to the side—or it may be the portrait of a mask, behind which there is no one.  A snapshot may be the thinnest slice of a second, even the instant between a bullet shot from a gun and the death of the man it finds. A snapshot is perfectly capable of distorting or blurring what the lens of the camera encompasses, but it can also seem more true than real life.  A snapshot must tell a whole history of something in only one breath.

In this class we will investigate the idea of the snapshot as it occurs in many media: novels, paintings, poems, plays, stories, dance, essays, films, and photographs.  As we discover how the elements of the snapshot—e.g. freeze-frames, voyeurism, figuration, spontaneity, disguise, composition, community, posing, pixilation, photorealism, chance, tricks of light, shadows of the dead, a sense of history—are at play in different ways in these texts, students will be able to form their own analyses of the works.  We will explore the texts in a way that gives students a sense of confidence in class discussion and general context, but also leaves students free to follow their own ideas and form their own opinions.  The papers will be a reflection of each student’s original thinking and research into the angle or concept that he or she finds most interesting in textual terms.

TEXTS:

Novels

To the Lighthouse—Virginia Woolf

Pedro Parrámo—Juan Ruolfo

The Phantom Lady—Cornell Woolrich

Stories & Essays

The Portrait of Dorian Gray—Oscar Wilde

The Portrait—Gogol

Essay on the Leica (in The New Yorker)—Anthony Lane

Blow-Up –Julio Cortazar

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (excerpt)—James Agee and Walker Evans

Films

Vertigo—Hitchcock

La Jeteé—Chris Marker

Blow Up—Antonioni

Paris is Burning—Jenny Livingston

La Double Vie de Veronique—Kieslowski

Screen Tests—Warhol

Sunset  Blvd.—Billy Wilder

Run Lola Run—Tom Twyker

Photos

Nan Goldin, Gary Winogrand, Lee Miller, Robert Capa, Carrie Mae Weems, Larry Sultan, Walker Evans (New York Subway series + southern WPA documentary photos),Henri Cartier-Bresson

War photojournalism: Selected photos

Jesus Rodriguez-Velasco (and in-class lec-dem)

Selected Photos from the SFMOMA’s collection (tour)

Dance

La La La Human Steps

Merce Cunningham

Giselle (through Cal Performances)

Swan Lake (through Cal Performances)

Painting

Chuck Close

Gerhard Richter

Flemish inventory paintings

Flemish still-life

Caravaggio

Drama

Fires in the Mirror—Anna Deveare Smith

Theory

“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”—Walter Benjamin

Camera Lucida (excerpt)—Roland Barthes

Poetry

Wallace Stevens: The Emperor of Ice Cream, Nude as a Pear, 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, The man with the Blue Guitar

Keats: The Grecian Urn