Photographing the Anthropocene: Nature,

This course will start by exploring techniques photographers have used over the past century to respond to the natural world’s beauty and complexity. During the second half of the term, we will examine how contemporary photographers are depicting shrinking natural landscapes, environmental destruction, and global warming and why some artists are beginning to question human centrality in the sentient world.

Augmented by literary texts by scientists, poets, artists, and ecologists, we will explore how close-looking might inform an artist’s practice regarding the living environment - its bounty - and its degradation. Readings include texts by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Masanobu Fukuoka, Robert Macfarlane, Terry Tempest Williams, Rebecca Solnit, Barry Lopez, John McPhee, Akira Hasegawa, and others. Calling on a canon of photographic works from around the globe, students will study book-length photographic essays whose makers have seen art as a form of praise of the natural world and those who investigate the relationship between art and environmental activism. Anna Atkins; Susan Derges; Meghann Riepenhoff; Masahisa Fukase; Pedro David; Stephen Gill; Ron Jude; Dornith Doherty; David Maisel, Zhao Renhui; Mandy Barker; Pablo Lopez Luz are some of the artists whose works we will study.

Students will produce a semester-long photographic project that engages with the natural world or explores an ecological theme.