jim schaefer photography

Jesuit cemetery, Georgetown University, 1999.

At Georgetown University, where I am associate dean of the Graduate School, I teach a graduate-level seminar on the history and rhetoric of photography as part of our M.A. program in Communication, Culture, and Technology. Here is a description of the course:

Photography is many things: it is a technical process, a documentary tool, a personal memento, a form of art, a tool for propaganda, a device to generate commerce, or any combination of these elements. It is both an act and the thing created by that act. Its apparent subject matter can be portraiture, still life, landscape, couture fashion, historical artifact, criminal evidence, scientific data, or any combination thereof. Why photograph was taken and what it means to a viewer can vary wildly depending on its physical condition, its provenance, and the different “given circumstances” (a term borrowed from the theatre) under which is was taken and under which it is viewed. The who, what, when, where, why, and how of these separate acts are frequently at odds with one another -- when they can be determined at all.

Perhaps most importantly, photography is simultaneously ubiquitous and nearly invisible. From its earliest days, now nearly 200 years ago, photography has been thought of as a window on reality. Even the most sophisticated viewers tend to see the thing represented, accepting it as truth, while failing to see the thing that is the photograph itself, let alone the intellectual, artistic, technical, and political process of which it is the end result. But as the late Richard Avedon put it, “All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.” The “thingness” of the photograph and the multiple processes that create it affect our understanding of the thing represented. How the photographer sees affects what the viewer sees.

This course will examine photography as both a way of seeing and a mode of rhetoric. We will approach the topic historically, but the markers of change over time – the technical innovations, the varying subject matter, and the generations of men and women who have made photographs for innumerable reasons – will not be considered as milestones of progress. Our purpose will not be to gauge the distance that separates us from photography's 19th century pioneers, Niepce, Daguerre, and Talbot – nor, for that matter, from such famous 20th century practitioners as Adams, Weston, or Evans. Rather, we will explore these historical markers as accretions, like the layers of a pearl, on the core human need to make images of the world.