Accessibility statement

The Emergence of Photography - HOA00098I

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  • Department: History of Art
  • Module co-ordinator: Dr. Jeremy Melius
  • Credit value: 20 credits
  • Credit level: I
  • Academic year of delivery: 2024-25

Module summary

This module explores key figures and theories in the history of photography, with emphasis on the range of scientific, aesthetic, and cultural meanings that emerged around its ‘invention’.

Module will run

Occurrence Teaching period
A Semester 1 2024-25

Module aims

Focusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this course offers an engagement with major theories and descriptive accounts of photography from its inception to the present day. What is a photograph, and what is it for? Should photography be understood as a technology or an artistic medium? How have photographs shifted our understandings of visual representation and our relation to the world? Special attention will be paid to the ways in which early photographic practices, and the writings that surrounded them, continue to define encounters with this elusive medium. Our goal is not only to develop and sharpen our understanding of photography and its discursive effects, but to find new ways of responding to it in our own critical writing.

Photographers considered may include Henry Fox Talbot, Louis Daguerre, Nicéphore Niépce, Hyppolite Bayard, Anna Atkins, Calvert Jones, David Octavius Hill, Nadar, Gustave Le Grey, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, James Van der Zee, Bill Brandt, William Eggleston, Roy DeCarava, Robert Adams, Zoe Leonard.

Writers considered may include François Arago, Edgar Allan Poe, Elizabeth Eastlake, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, John Szarkowski, Roland Barthes, Rosalind Krauss, Tina Campt, Christopher Pinney, Shawn Michelle Smith, Kaja Silverman.

Module learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should have acquired:

  • Familiarity with a range of key critical texts and photographic practices;
  • An ability to analyse and think critically about photography and its discursive effects;
  • A capacity to respond to photographs clearly and effectively in writing.

Assessment

Task Length % of module mark
Essay/coursework
Intermediate Assignment		 N/A 100

Special assessment rules

None

Reassessment

None

Module feedback

You will receive feedback on assessed work within the timeframes set out by the University - please check the Guide to Assessment, Standards, Marking and Feedback for more information.

The purpose of feedback is to help you to improve your future work. If you do not understand your feedback or want to talk about your ideas further, you are warmly encouraged to meet your Tutor and/or Supervisor during their office hours.

Indicative reading

  • Armstrong, Carol. Scenes in a Library: Read the Photograph in the Book, 1843-1875. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.
  • Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
  • Benjamin, Walter. On Photography. Edited by Esther Leslie. London: Reaktion Books, 2015.
  • Campt, Tina, Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg, and Brian Wallis. Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography. Göttingen: Steidl, 2020.
  • Edwards, Steve. The Making of English Photography: Allegories. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006.
  • Krauss, Rosalind. “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View.” Art Journal 42.4 (Winter 1982): 311-319.
  • Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3-64.
  • Siegel, Steffan, ed. First Exposures: Writings from the Beginning of Photography. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2017.
  • Silverman, Kaja. The Miracle of Analogy. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.
  • Trachtenberg, Alan, ed. Classic Essays on Photography. New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980.


The information on this page is indicative of the module that is currently on offer. The University is constantly exploring ways to enhance and improve its degree programmes and therefore reserves the right to make variations to the content and method of delivery of modules, and to discontinue modules, if such action is reasonably considered to be necessary by the University. Where appropriate, the University will notify and consult with affected students in advance about any changes that are required in line with the University's policy on the Approval of Modifications to Existing Taught Programmes of Study.