Tuesday evenings, 18.30 - 20.00
This six-week course will look at photography’s role in shaping dominant and state-constructed ways of seeing. The use of the image to create powerful narratives is well-known, yet the continuing need to question what we are looking at - to look at, through and behind the image - remains critical.
We will examine how photography has been instrumental in constructing national identities and reinforcing myths, and – just as powerfully, often through the work of individual artists – dismantling them. The course will trace colonial and post-colonial entanglements across various geographies connected by imperial logic, including Palestine, Malaya, Pakistan and Kenya, as well as focusing on the desired image of UK, the US and Soviet Russia.
We will investigate the image's role in propaganda, in fostering belonging and estrangement, and its relationship to truth. The course will highlight contemporary image-makers whose documentary practices challenge dominant histories through archival interventions, documentation, dissemination, and reconstruction in their pursuit of resistance. Historical and theoretical framings of exile and refuge, which can transform ways of seeing and being, will extend our image-analysis.
We will also study how transdisciplinary practice, such as performance or the use of fiction, might increase connection with the audience of the work. What does it mean to make work public, or to view collectively? Can photography help us navigate the complexities of the individual and the collective, both in memory and in society?
Writers referenced include: Tina Campt, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Avery Gordon, Edward Said, W G Sebald, Kareem Estefan, Roland Barthes, Nadine El Enany, Omar El Akkad, Hannah Arendt, John Berger.
Led by writer and curator Max Houghton.
Who is this for?
This course is designed for documentary photographers seeking to activate their images, to deepen practice through research, for individuals considering photography or visual culture in higher education; as well as those with an interest in law, politics and the power of images.
Details on how to access the sessions will be confirmed upon registration. Please check your junk folders if you haven't received an email from TPG staff confirming your place. By booking for this event you agree to our Terms & Conditions.
Biography
Max Houghton is a writer and curator working with the photographic image as it intersects with law and politics. She runs the MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication (UAL) where she co-founded the research-hub Visible Justice. She is the recipient of the Royal Photographic Society prize for excellence in education (2023). She writes regularly for international institutions and the arts press, including Granta, 1000 Words, Barbican, PhMuseum, BJP and many more. Her latest monograph essay is on Mary Ellen Mark’s Ward 81 (Steidl 2023). She is completing doctoral research on the image in international criminal law at UCL.
Schedule
Week One | Post-War Peoples on Tue 22 Apr, 18.30-20.00
This session examines the role of photography in shaping state narratives – whether to pursue superpower ambitions, as part of a colonial project, or to create a national identity, post-independence.
We will analyse the photographic image alongside its modes of dissemination, including magazines, photobooks and films. Case studies include the ‘Nuremberg moment’ after WWII, using images from the International Military Tribunal for the Senior Nazi War Criminals, when the US and USSR vied for global dominance. We will then pursue British incursions into Kenya and Malaya during the 1950s and 1960s, Guyana’s independence in 1966, before making a temporal shift to the Arab Uprisings of 2011. Artists we will discuss include: Sim Chi Yin, Sarah Waiswa, Max Pinckers, The Mosireen Collective.
Week Two | A Fiction Forced Upon Us on Tue 29 Apr, 18.30-20.00
This session explores the relationships between history, myth, nationhood and empire, focusing on how contemporary photographers navigate this terrain. Case studies include: Lina Geoushy, Guy Martin, Larissa Sansour and Diana Matar, who each complicate idealised myths of nationhood, and use their photographic practices to destabilise imperial ideology. A focus on humanism’s role in photography’s histories, popularised by and debated ever since The Family of Man exhibition in 1955 at MOMA, will engender debate about the universal, the singular, and the sticky concept of democracy.
Texts by W J T Mitchell, Roland Barthes, Alan Sekula
Week Three | Reactivating the Archive on Tue 6 May, 19.30-20.00
How has the archive functioned as both a site of silence and violence, and yet can be transformed into a space of resistance? What happens when the continued existence of the archive is threatened?
Works by Sara Salaam, Ndidi Dike, Susan Meiselas, Naiza Khan, Sunil Shah and Walid Raad, highlight how archives serve both as records of colonial dogma and platforms for anti-colonial sentiment.
Texts by Kareem Estefan, Tina Campt, Ann Stoler
Week Four | The Aesthetics of the Secret on Tue 13 May, 18.30-20.00
This session examines how artists expose hidden truths – including those hidden in plain sight - that disrupt official state narratives and concepts of collective memory. We will discuss Edmund Clark and Crofton Black’s work on the War on Terror, Vera Zurbrügg on Switzerland’s Nazi Gold and Salvatore Vitale’s exploration of Swiss securitisation.
Texts by Eyal Weizman, Claire Birchall, Michael Rothberg
Week Five | The Condition of Exile on Tue 20 May, 18.30-20.00
What happens when connections between people and land are severed? This session explores displacement and how it is expressed through photography and literature. We analyse After the Last Sky by Edward Said and Jean Mohr, which documents exile in image and text, as does W.G. Sebald’s unclassifiable work The Emigrants. We will also consider the impact of exile on artists like Amak Mahmoodian, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Tarrah Krajnak.
Texts by Edward Said, W G Sebald, Omar El Akkad
Week Six | Nowhere/Somewhere/Someone: Reconstructed Identities on Tue 27 May, 18.30-20.00
How are contemporary visual artists using photography to tell what Stuart Hall calls ‘the extremely long story’ about their personal origins and their sense of belonging? We will study the contrapuntal work of diasporic artists such as Khadija Saye, Monica Alcazar Duarte, and Mame-Diarra Niange, whose works are united by a refusal to be reduced to ‘types’. The transdisciplinary aesthetic strategies employed by Jermaine Francis, Rene Matic and by Johny Pitts to navigate the intersection of race and class in the UK will also be explored. Finally, we will look at how artists challenge the institutions that influence and carry our ways of seeing, such as Hew Locke’s retelling of Britain’s imperial histories and the institutional critique and multiple modes of address offered by Abbas Zahedi.
Texts by Khalid Abdalla, Nadine El Enany, Eduard Glissant
