H95.0829 Lecture 4 Credits
| Section 001 | #75968 | Peter Lucas | Wednesday, 2 - 5 | 719 Broadway, 313 |
Today, many documentarians consider themselves working within a well-defined human rights framework where images and film are used to raise awareness and critical consciousness about social injustice. On the far edge of this movement, however, there are photographers and filmmakers whose work calls attention to the traditional documentary ethics of bearing witness but whose images and modes of representation blur the lines between fact and fiction. This body of work is more open-ended to interpretation and multiple readings than traditional documentary representation. And while their themes are just as serious as straight documentarians, their work engages different audiences in a variety of venues.
The Poetics of Witnessing will focus on photographers and a few select non-fiction filmmakers whose work combines politics and aesthetics in innovative and radical ways. Beginning with a theoretical base of Sontag's On Photography and Barthe's Camera Lucida, the course will study several different kinds of visual poetics such as combining documentary material with literature (W.G. Sebald), archival and found images (Christian Boltanski), the photo essay book (Robert Frank), the essay film (Chris Marker), personal filmmaking (Jonas Mekas), ethnographic film poetics (Robert Gardner), multi media installations (Miguel Rio Branco), photo reportage and cultural memory (Susan Meiselas), visual autobiography (Nan Goldin), mixed media (Lorna Simpson) public projections (Krzysztof Wodiczko). By studying these various artists, students will learn about alternative visual strategies to engage politically challenging themes which in turn open up different spaces for discussion and the potential for change.
