Kalamazoo College Moodle

The objective of this studio art course is to provide the student a working knowledge of, and experience with, the fundamental creative tools used in fine art photographic practice. For this particular class, we will use digital cameras, optimize with Photoshop, with the end product to be viewed on monitor, though we’ll also go over the process of making an archival pigment print.

In addition to producing photographs, participants learn to analyze and discuss their work in critiques. When regarding the images produced in this course, discussion will be centered on technical, formal, and conceptual characteristics. We will also discuss subject matter and content—and the difference between the two. In this critical “reading” of images, like that of a text, we will explore some of the basics of visual literacy.

To inspire and contextualize we will view historical examples from the Daguerreotype to contemporary practice, with an emphasis on recent digital work. Through this study and the production of a small body of work, each student should complete the course with an introductory understanding of contemporary photographic practice.

Intermediate Microeconomics is the more advanced treatment of concepts introduced in Principles of Economics. It is a theoretical course meant to give economics and business students insights into how to make good economic decisions. As such, the course emphasizes how rational individuals make optimal decisions when facing constraints.

How do we imagine the past? What techniques do we – as individuals and as societies – use to remember, describe, and explain it? How does the memory of the past affect our understandings of who we are? How and why does the past became politicized? These questions were important to a range of writers, historians, artists, philosophers, and politicians in twentieth-century Europe, who over the course of the century became increasingly convinced that historical memory was central to individual, communal, and national identity. This conviction has led to both serious scholarly investigations into memory’s operations and, in some cases, to attempts to control memory and historical narratives for political gain.

This course will take an interdisciplinary approach to the study of memory and history to explore historical memory’s role in shaping twentieth-century European politics and identities. We will begin by exploring different theoretical approaches to the study of individual and collective memory. We will then turn to important case studies that have played an outsized role in shaping European memory culture – including the memory of World War I and World War II, the Holocaust, European imperialism, and Eastern European communism. Along the way, we will explore different “sites” of memory – including monuments, memorials, museums, memoirs, novels, and films. We’ll also trace the complex interplay between collective memory and collective forgetting.

This course combines research and studio components. The research topic, broadly painted, will be fine art documentary practices, grounded with the entry-level hands-on studio component of digital photography.

Related to these two components, there are two expected outcomes: to give participants creative control of photographic tools (technical, formal, conceptual) prior to their possible departure for study-away, but also to explore the issues and ethics of documentary photographic practice. While the research topic is broad, including theory and tradition, this course would place particular emphasis on the ethics of photographing outside of one’s own group or culture (more below).

Through research (readings, short writing assignments, discussion) and the production of a small body of work, each student should complete this course with a basic technical foundation in digital photography generally, as well as an introductory understanding of documentary photographic practice—including gaining an awareness of the responsibility involved when “taking” someone’s picture.