ARTVIS 306R-000: Advanced Photography (Spring 2010)

This course is the most advanced course in the photo curriculum.  It asks that you complete an in-depth self-assigned body of work during the semester, with the goal that it be of an exhibitable quality.  The course is primarily critique-based, and assignments will be tailored to you as individuals and to the progress of your work.  The pace of the class is rigorous.  Every two weeks each of you will present a minimum of 15-20 new photographs, as well as writings, research and related materials as necessary, and this "installment" becomes the basis of new work to follow.  Major tasks of the course include learning to assess the evolution of a project, adapting form and content to changing needs and opportunities, addressing editing and presentational issues as core creative tasks, closely studying other photographers for their initiatives and lessons, and above all understanding how to make individual images, objects and texts collaborate toward a "whole" statement.

An important part of this course will be to understand how photographic meaning changes relative to photographic form, beginning with the choices to be made while photographing, to the creation of single images, images in combinations and sequences,  and images in relation to texts.  In the first half of the class you will be asked to work in the form of prints, and in the second half of the course, you will choose one of the four primary cultural sites where photographic meaning happens-the wall, the page, the screen, and the vernacular object.  Thus, for the second half of the course, you might choose to make a book, organize an exhibition or an installation (i.e. in response to an architectural space somewhere on the campus, or off-campus), or create a web site or DVD.