Studies in the Relations Between Literature and the Other Arts

Photography’s history has typically been told from the vantage point of Europe, with its double invention joining the Burgundy countryside (Joseph Nicéphore Niépce) to an English abbey (William Henry Fox Talbot) and occasionally Alexandria or China (when allowance is made for pre-photographic technologies).  We now know that this history is provincial at best and works both to obscure photography’s other stories of origin and invention and to support its ongoing collusion with techniques of colonization, domination, and power. In this course, we will explore some of photography’s “other histories” with a view to opening the extant paradigms. Readings will span early research on optics (Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, Leonardo, Kepler, Descartes) and scholarship on late 20th-century and contemporary photographers (Touhami Ennadre, Santu Mofokeng, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Philip Kwame Agapya, Malick Sidibé, Seydou Keïta). We will draw on work in art history, visual anthropology, and philosophical aesthetics, as well as on more explicitly text-based approaches. Special emphasis will be given to the example of West Africa, where a thriving studio tradition has increasingly drawn international attention. Specific themes and questions will include the dominance of portraiture in non-European traditions; the transformation of portraiture and of photography more generally by ritual and ceremonial uses (in ako and as a substitute for ibeji, the effigy of the dead twin, in Yorubaland); race, gender, and other bodily transformations; the consequences for theory and practice when photography is not preceded by a tradition of two-dimensional painting; the relationships among photography, nationalism, and democracy. Ideally, our exploration will enable us to re-situate photography in relation to other techniques of cultural memory and to ask in a more satisfying way about its participation in the more general regime of epistemological violence.

Books: Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minnesota, 1986); Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (MIT Press, 1997); Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology, and Museums (Oxford, 2001); Okwui Enwezor, Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (Steidl Publishing, 2006); Michael D. Harris, Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation (University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Gerald Matt and Thomas Miessgang, eds., Flash Afrique! Studio Photography from West Africa (Steidl Publishing, 2002); Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Peterson, eds., Photography’s Other Histories (Duke University Press, 2003). Supplementary readings (available in course reader): Heike Behrend and Tobias Wendl, selections from Snap me one! Studiofotografen in Afrika; Walter Benjamin, “Small History of Photography,” “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”; Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture”; Achille Mbembe, selections from On the Postcolony; miscellaneous texts on optics. Film screenings: Tobias Wendl and Nancy du Plessis, Future Remembrance: Photography and Image Arts in Ghana.