Photography: Between Art and Technology

Noam Yuran | Science, Technology, and Society

Course Number: 278111-01
Course Type: Seminar
Credits: 2
Academic Year: 2024–2025
Semester: Fall
Day & Time: Sunday, 12:00–14:00
Office Hours: By appointment
Instructor Email: noamyuran@gmail.com

Course Description

The inventors of photography, Daguerre in France and Talbot in England, described the marvel of their invention in strikingly different yet complementary ways. Talbot famously characterized photography as a device through which nature itself draws — “the pencil of nature.” Both emphasized that the new medium would serve not only art, but also law and science. Daguerre even suggested that the camera would take its place alongside scientific instruments such as the thermometer, barometer, telescope, and microscope.

In retrospect, the camera was — and remains — a remarkable device precisely because its purpose has never been fully settled. From its invention, through cinema and television, to the smartphone camera, the history of photography can be understood as a continuous series of experiments: an ongoing exploration of what can be done with the same apparatus.

Seen this way, the camera occupies a pivotal position between technology and art. It is a device that enables new artistic forms, and an art practice that investigates the possibilities embedded in the device itself. For this reason, as Susan Sontag famously observed, despite photography’s reputation for naïve realism, it is in fact the only art form that fulfilled the surrealist vision. Photography may appear to copy reality, yet it is equally capable of estranging it and reshaping how we perceive the world.

In this course, we will trace the extraordinary history of photography while asking fundamental philosophical questions along the way. We will examine the ontology of the photographic image and the ways it shapes our understanding of reality. We will ask what kind of device the camera is, and how it mediates relationships between photographers, subjects, and viewers. We will explore cinema and television and their deep integration into everyday life and social experience. We will study digital photography, its social uses, and the new genres it has produced. Finally, we will turn to non-human photography and reflect on the peculiar fascination exerted by visual images generated automatically.

Learning Objectives and Outcomes

Knowledge
Students will become familiar with key milestones in the history of photography and will engage with several classic texts that address the enduring enigma of the photographic image.

Skills
We are surrounded by photographs. We photograph and are photographed constantly. As a result, it has become difficult to remember just how strange photography truly is. The central task of this course is to recover that sense of strangeness — and to learn to see photography anew.

Brian Winston, Media Technology and Society. A History: from the Telegraph to the Internet

Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter

Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: the Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior

Andre Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”

Hagi Kenaan, Photogrphy and its Shadow 

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The movement-image

Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film

Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form

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Jerome Bourdon, "Live Television Is Still Alive: On Television as an Unfulfilled Promise", Media Culture and Society 22:5 (2000)

Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image, or, What Happened to the American Dream 

Nick Couldry, Media Rituals: a Critical Approach 

Bill Nichols. Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture

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Anna McCarthy, “’Stanley Milgram, Allen Funt, and Me’: Postwar Social Science and the ‘First Wave’ of Reality TV”, in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture

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Boris Groys, In the Flow

Paul Frosh, "The Gestural Image: The Selfie, Photography Theory, and Kinesthetic Sociability", International journal of communication 9.0 (2015)

Jens Ruchatz, "Selfie Reflexivity: Pictures of People Taking Photographs" in Julia Eckel, Jens Ruchatz and Sabine Wirth (eds.) Exploring the Selfie

Joanna Zylinska, Nonhuman Photography