Part II of a two-semester course that will survey major topics in the Histories of Photography. Emphasis will be given to the diverse cultural uses of photography from its invention to the present day. Such uses include: the illustrated press; amateur photography; studio photography; industrial; advertising, and fashion photography; political and social propaganda; educational and documentary photography; and photography as a medium of artistic expression. Much attention will be paid to how photographs construct histories, as well as being constructed by them.

Preference given to Sophomore Photography Students.

Major Requirement | BFA Photography

Photography is often tethered to evidence and truth, and thought of as a recording device to describe the world. However, photographs are shaped by subjectivity, memory, and belief, and can be used to deceive, distort, and conjure. In this course, we will explore photography as a medium for mythmaking, one capable of shaping belief, fabricating narrative, and giving form to what feels invisible or difficult to name.

Through image-making, writing, reading, and discussion, students will develop a practice of mythmaking, considering the camera as a tool for world building and imagination. We will engage with visual theory, folklore, and contemporary artists, asking how photographs can construct worlds, explore the porous threshold between truth and fiction, and create spaces where memory, myth, history, and obsession overlap and intersect. Texts will examine the ethics and possibilities of creation and how the lines between experience, belief, and myth have historically been defined. As image-makers, students will synthesize learnings and experiment with sequencing and presentation across multiple formats, including zines and print-based installations, considering how the two modes alter interpretation.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00

Elective

This winter session class is devoted to the color blue.  Through the historical photo process cyanotype (aka the blueprint), students will create unique prints that can be used in artist books, clothing, sculpture, quilts, collages, or as stand-alone imagery. We will print on various surfaces such as fabric, objects, hand-made and store-bought paper.  Students will bring items, darkroom negatives, drawings, and digital images to convert into digital negatives in class.  Other mediums can be put on top of the cyanotype, so we will explore its multimedia capabilities. Finally, we will also change the blue by natural toning our cyanotypes.  Please bring a sense of curiosity, and experimentation.   

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00 - $200.00

Elective

This workshop introduces students to digital video as both a technical process and a medium for constructing meaning through time. Students will learn the fundamentals of camera operation and data capture, including exposure, focus, frame rate, shot duration, camera movement, composition, and sound recording. Using Adobe Premiere, they will develop practical workflows for organizing footage, editing and sequencing images, working with sound, making basic color corrections, and exporting finished projects. Through demonstrations, screenings, and short assignments, students will consider how framing, duration, sequence, rhythm, and repetition shape the ways moving images are produced and understood. The workshop emphasizes the relationship between technical decisions and artistic intention, encouraging students to approach the camera and the edit as active tools for observation, experimentation, and expression.

No previous experience with video or Adobe Premiere is necessary.

Elective

This workshop introduces students to digital video as both a technical process and a medium for constructing meaning through time. Students will learn the fundamentals of camera operation and data capture, including exposure, focus, frame rate, shot duration, camera movement, composition, and sound recording. Using Adobe Premiere, they will develop practical workflows for organizing footage, editing and sequencing images, working with sound, making basic color corrections, and exporting finished projects. Through demonstrations, screenings, and short assignments, students will consider how framing, duration, sequence, rhythm, and repetition shape the ways moving images are produced and understood. The workshop emphasizes the relationship between technical decisions and artistic intention, encouraging students to approach the camera and the edit as active tools for observation, experimentation, and expression.

No previous experience with video or Adobe Premiere is necessary.

Elective

This workshop introduces students to digital video as both a technical process and a medium for constructing meaning through time. Students will learn the fundamentals of camera operation and data capture, including exposure, focus, frame rate, shot duration, camera movement, composition, and sound recording. Using Adobe Premiere, they will develop practical workflows for organizing footage, editing and sequencing images, working with sound, making basic color corrections, and exporting finished projects. Through demonstrations, screenings, and short assignments, students will consider how framing, duration, sequence, rhythm, and repetition shape the ways moving images are produced and understood. The workshop emphasizes the relationship between technical decisions and artistic intention, encouraging students to approach the camera and the edit as active tools for observation, experimentation, and expression.

No previous experience with video or Adobe Premiere is necessary.

Elective

This seminar will explore some of the inherent violence(s) of differing forms of representation, as well as an array of images that contend with the representation of violence, in order to better grasp some of the powerful interacting phenomena at work in our contemporary experience of social, political, sexual, racial and economic difference. This will be our task: to develop means of better grasping how both images and ideas act on us in the perpetuation and the normalization of forms of violent differentiation, and to reckon with how those self-same images and ideas might simultaneously offer means of resistance. Students will read, respond verbally in open discussion, write an essay, prepare slide presentations to deliver to class, produce an annotated bibliography and generate visual work in response to assignments in class.

We will attend to the tacit and yet essential violences that operate at the level of our conceptualization of the photographic image, as well as of the human body, in terms of its gendered expression, its sexual identity, its race, its alterity and its abjection. This work will be informed by a combination of close readings of photographic theory, but equally by trenchant political critiques of culture, and new strains of film criticism. Working outward from readings of Roland Barthes and Tina Campt, we will explore the photographic archive, and the question of whether we can bring new modes of attention to our encounters with photographic images—modes of attention that are attuned to our embodied experience of seeing and listening, and that draw on an interdisciplinary understanding of the various forces with which the photographic image is charged. We will assess the various ways in which representations of the black body—and new conceptualizations of blackness itself—free us up to perceive unstated but ongoing forms of violence and of resistance, both in representation and in the history on which images of blackness depend.

Through a reading of Afropessimist critiques of recent cinema, we will examine profoundly powerful forms of symbolic violence, opening on to a process of questioning the structural position of the black female figure, both in film and in our cultural imaginary. Working through iconic images of torture and of death, we will examine the fragile and mutable symbol of the American national body, exploring its adaptability to a process of queering, and its ongoing resistance to transformation by race. We will also examine the ways in which the refusal to represent might act as a means to embody and approximate the depth of trauma at work in genocide, debating the relative merits of withholding images as against displaying them. This will lead us back to Barthes and Campt at the semester’s end. This seminar depends upon a willingness to regularly view controversial and emotive imagery, and an equal commitment to free, responsive and principled debate. It is my hope that we will fail together often and unselfconsciously, and that we will grapple frankly with the complex relays of power that divide us, while they are held up for us to see within and beyond the reproducible image.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $25.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. This course is a requirement for Sophomore Photography students.

Major Requirement | BFA Photography

In the traditional copper plate photogravure process a photograph is etched into a copper plate and printed with ink on paper using an Intaglio press. The gravure process has long been viewed as one of the most beautiful of all  print processes. The traditional gravure process is one of the most technical and difficult, requiring years of experience. The modern Photopolymer gravure process provides the same incredible detail and tonality as the traditional process but with much less effort. Students can etch any type of digital image on a polymer plate and create prints that match and even exceed the traditional process. For the first 3 weeks of class the class students will learn an advanced Black and White digital workflow and master the profiling software required to make profiles for printing direct to plate. Students will learn the required print making skills and will experiment with various ink choices and paper types, including the Chine Colle (the printing with fine thin paper) to provide subtle color changes and increased detail. Students will complete a portfolio of their choice for the final project.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $200.00

Students must have advanced level BW film and digital photography skills. Please contact the instructor for permission to register.

Elective

Over the past decade, photography books have seen a resurgence within the art world, this time transcending their original use as survey or catalog to become ideal spaces and platforms to experience and disseminate work. Today image-based printed matter functions in a multitude of ways, all of which at their core are driven by the mechanics of sequence and editing. Through class discussions, using RISD's Fleet Library and Special Collections, and individual research - students will form a personal vision of what images mean in the book form. Our focus will be equally on content, concept, production & technique. The semester will culminate in each student having devised, sequenced, edited and produced a fully resolved and realized photography book.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $125.00

Elective

This is a basic course in the techniques of photographic seeing. Students will be given exercises to develop their ideas concerning the fundamental visual problems of photography. Students will also learn technical aspects of exposure, developing and printing in the darkroom as they explore and respond to the visual qualities of the medium. Students must provide their own 35mm camera with manual controls.

Elective

This is a basic course in the techniques of photographic seeing. Students will be given exercises to develop their ideas concerning the fundamental visual problems of photography. Students will also learn technical aspects of exposure, developing and printing in the darkroom as they explore and respond to the visual qualities of the medium. Students must provide their own 35mm camera with manual controls.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00 - $200.00

Elective

This is a basic course in the techniques of photographic seeing. Students will be given exercises to develop their ideas concerning the fundamental visual problems of photography. Students will also learn technical aspects of exposure, developing and printing in the darkroom as they explore and respond to the visual qualities of the medium. Students must provide their own 35mm camera with manual controls.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00 - $200.00

Elective

This is a basic course in the techniques of photographic seeing. Students will be given exercises to develop their ideas concerning the fundamental visual problems of photography. Students will also learn technical aspects of exposure, developing and printing in the darkroom as they explore and respond to the visual qualities of the medium. Students must provide their own 35mm camera with manual controls.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00 - $200.00

Elective

The Sophomore Studio is focused on the of each student's expressive vision so that she/he can create photographs with compelling content. Through group critiques and individual meetings with the instructor, students will refine their skills as photographers and learn how to verbally articulate issues in their own work as well as the work of others. The greater part of the class will geared towards creating an open an dynamic environment where students engage in the give and take of constructive feedback on their progress. The critique schedule will be enriched by readings, multimedia lectures and class field trips throughout the semester. Attendance at all department visiting artist lectures is required.

Major Requirement | BFA Photography

A continuation of PHOTO-5302, providing an open and dynamic environment where sophomore can create photographs and engage in constructive feedback on their progress.

Enrollment is limited to Sophomore Photography Students.

Major Requirement | BFA Photography

The Junior Studio continues the process begun in the Sophomore Studio but moves it to a more ambitious and sustained level of production and critical feedback. Students will be expected to work more autonomously and will explore their ideas with more focus and depth, with the goal of working toward the successful production of several bodies of work over the course of the year. Group and individual critiques will continue to form the basis of the course curriculum, supplemented by visiting critics, field trips and class exercises. Attendance at all departmental visiting artist lectures is required.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00 - $200.00

Enrollment is limited to Junior Photography Students.

Major Requirement | BFA Photography

A continuation of Photo 5305 allowing junior level majors to investigate their image making concerns in depth. Class time will be used to critique work in progress.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00 - $200.00

Enrollment is limited to Junior Photography Students.

Major Requirement | BFA Photography

The Senior Studio brings together the advanced skills and ideas about image-making that each student in the major has developed over the previous two years. Students are expected to work independently on their individual projects with the expectation of a culminating body of work to be presented in a public exhibition during the spring semester (Degree Project). As in Junior Studio, group and individual critiques with faculty and visiting artists will continue to form the basis of the course curriculum. Attendance at all departmental visiting artist lectures is required.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $200.00 - $250.00

Enrollment is limited to Senior Photography Students.

Major Requirement | BFA Photography

This course is designed to give junior majors a thorough and deep understanding of the intermediate-level workflow for film capture and scanning and digital camera RAW file capture. Both workflows allow students to produce the highest quality inkjet prints on large-format printers. This course will touch on many topics, including advanced tonal and color correction techniques, image sharpening, digital camera exposure and Raw file processing, inkjet and Lightjet printing and automated batch file processing. While this course is primarily technical, students are expected to pursue their ongoing personal work to fulfill assignments, culminating in a final portfolio of 10 finished digital prints that demonstrate mastery of the techniques learned in the course. Students entering the course should be proficient in the use of the Macintosh platform and basic Photoshop operations and have a good understanding of processing and printing in black and white photography. Transfer majors must demonstrate these proficiencies to the satisfaction of the department before being permitted to enroll in this course.

Major Requirement | BFA Photography

This course will wrestle with the mercurial and ever-evolving subject of Time-Based art. What is Time-Based art? Is it simply art with durational elements that unfold over the course of the work? Is it art that depends on time to define itself? Is it art that can only exist within the confines of regulated space? Is it art that stands firmly in the aftermath of what preceded it? Is it art that keeps time, wastes time, witnesses time, changes time, rearranges time, or records time? In this course, we will explore and welcome work being made under the broad umbrella of Time-Based work, such as: documentary photography, video art, experimental film, performance art, recorded happenings, social practice, and sculpture made with temporal dimensions. The course will operate as a studio course, with students being asked to present work for critique regularly, as well as weekly discussions of historical and contemporary investigations and demonstrations of Time-Based art.

Elective