62-326 Photographic Narrative
9 units, Carnegie Mellon University
Most photographs tell stories. We see photographs in newspapers, magazines, snapshot albums, on the web, in books, and in posters. In these contexts photographs often work with words to convey meaning, whether they are shown with captions, news stories, or just with titles. Photographs can work without words, too, to create purely visual narratives. In this course, students will make two series of photographs one that is fiction and one that is nonfiction. In addition to making photographs, students will determine the context in which their photostories will be seen. Students may make photo books, for example, or decide that their images will be seen on a website. While students are making photographs, we will explore the rich traditions of photographic storytelling that range from the worldoriented work of photojournalist W. Eugene Smith to the documentarians such as Walker Evans, Nicholas Nixon, and Alec Soth. We will look at photographers, too, who constructed private worlds, such as Duane Michals, Cindy Sherman, Bruce Charlesworth, and Laurie Simmons. As students explore both fiction and nonfiction through photographs, we will look at the interesting interplay between words and photographic images how images are paced and scaled to create tempos how photographs are sequenced to tell stories and other formal elements involved in creating visual narratives. Prerequisite a college level photography course or consent of instructor.
Prerequisites: none listed
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