Course 2010-2011 a.y.

Course Objectives

This course provides a theoretical and practical approach to understanding contemporary visual culture through photography and films and aims to provide students with the key theoretical tools to evaluate and challenge complex image usage that highlight contemporary ethical concerns and issues of sociology and psychology relevant to the concept of selfidentity.

Course Content Summary

• The relevancy of the visual arts.
• Visual languages : semiotics and historical context.
• Photography and contemporary society.
• Individuals and society: contemporary issues.
• The abstract and the spirit.
• Documents and memory.
• Contemporary mythologies, fashion and retail.
• Cinema: from the hero to the narcissist.
• Cinema: relationships and the lost self.
• Cinema: social fragmentation and anxiety.
• The portrait: how we see others and why.

Detailed Description of Assessment Methods

There is a new emphasis on film and it’s role in defining the self.

There is a mid-term paper on photographic semiotics.

As extra-curricula activity I have created a Web-cast program for BstudentsTV.

Textbooks

• Howells, Richard, Visual Culture, 2003, Polity Press, Cambridge (Part 1)
• Szarkowsky, John The Photographer’s Eye, 1963, MoMA New York
• Berger, John Ways of seeing, 1990, Penguis Books, London
• Barthes, Roland Mythologies, 1993, Vintage Classics, New York