In this introductory lecture, we will look at the outline of the module, as well as the idea that theory, practice and histories of photography overlap. We will also look at ideas of modes of photography, narrative voice, and story arcs. The emphasis is on the photographers taking control and responsibility of their work.

Who does the looking In this lecture we will look at the origins of portrait photography, how the face became the ‘mirror into the soul’, and how power and control have been invested in the person taking the photograph. We will also look at the global nature of photography, and the ways different theories of image, self, and photographic identity emerge from different visual traditions in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

Where we look and what we show. Who does the looking matters? What we choose to look at matters too. And so does where you look at, and what we show. This lecture will look at the diverse global origins of landscape photography, examining the idea that the landscape is inherently political and economic in the way that it is and has been portrayed. The lecture will go beyond the picturesque to look at theories that extend to contemporary surveys of the landscape in representations of environmental issues, climate change, and land ownership. In this lecture what you don’t show matters just as much as what you do.

This lecture will look at the relationship between photography, anthropology, and travel. It will look at how photography has been used to show distant places (from a European perspective), how ideas of the exotic developed from art and extended into photography, and how this photographic practice extended into a dominant way of viewing the world. And it’s a way of looking that we need to move on from.

In this survey of street photography, we will look both at the grand tradition of Western street photography, as well as an expanded, global view of street photography that covers ideas of surveillance, technology, and voyeurism and how these mix with ideas of urban, economic, and national identity in contemporary representations of the street.

In this lecture, we will look at how photography, film, and literature have overlapped in staged photography and self-portraiture. Ideas of autobiography, the body, and the self will overlap with the ways in which different photographers have used cinema, national identity, and political histories to examine who they are and who, through the camera, they can be.

The first photography we are exposed to is family photography. We are photographed as babies, as children, in a variety of situations that are both individual yet standardised – we are photographed at family gatherings, in groups, at celebrations, on holiday. This lecture will look at how family photography both replicates idealised concepts of the family, as well as look at work where that idea of the ideal family is undermined and reinvented.

The boundaries between photographic genre have become blurred as definitive ideas of photographic style have merged and overlapped. This lecture will examine how photography has used fiction, storytelling, and speculation to tell a story. It will look at narrative approaches, unreliable narrators and the questioning of photographic frameworks as a means to an end in visual storytelling. How do you tell a story with images? That Is at the heart of this series of lectures and that is how this series will conclude.