ARTH 359 Studies in Contemporary Photographic Art

• Tuesdays, 8:45 - 11:30 am
• Instructor: Dr. Julia Skelly

In a talk given at Concordia in May 2023, Black feminist art historian Dr. Charmaine Nelson stated: “Academic work can be social justice work.” The premise of this course is that art history can be, and do, social justice work. In a related vein, photography has played a crucial role in activism and social justice from the nineteenth century to the present, for example in the context of the nineteenth-century Abolitionist movement, images of the American civil war (which was instigated by some Americans’ wish to abolish slavery), the civil rights movement of the 1960s, photographs of the Vietnam War, and, more recently, the climate movement. We will discuss images produced by photojournalists and contemporary artists working with, and sometimes critically engaging with, photography. Part of the course will be dedicated to photographs representing Black subjects and produced by Black artists, but we will also discuss work by queer artists such as David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar and Andreas Sterzing who strategically used photography in the context of the AIDS crisis, as well as Indigenous photographers and other artists of colour working against the complex histories of photography as a medium that was employed from the early nineteenth century to create racist images, including, but not limited to, ethnographic photographs.