Graduate Seminar in Photo & Related Medi

Kind Radiance: Photography & Ethics
Graduate Seminar in Photo & Related Media

From its early days, Photography has been surrounded by questions of ethics. Anthropology in particular has struggled with its earlier history as a companion to Colonial conquest. How else to understand the ethnographer’s photo documentation of brutality enacted in the Congo, or the supposedly “neutral” cataloguing of Bedouin women that was setting up an image database for control. During the British rule of India, image merged with biometrics, developing the world’s first “criminal” fingerprint measurement method. More contemporary debates about exploitation have placed the venerable Magnum Photo Agency into turmoil, while questions of appropriation follow contemporary art figures such as Richard Prince, and are satirized by collectives such as New Red Order. Photographers during war have faced different questions, about whether documenting atrocities is enough, or whether the image maker also needs to intervene. Appropriately, the title of this class is an inversion of Susie Linfield’s Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (2010). We hope to reach an optimistic inversion of Linfield’s sources of worry, and your own artistic and writing process will be the starting points for questions around ethics, appropriation, agency, witnessing, and permission. We will be reading contemporary theory and narratives, as we experiment with reading others images, and making our own.