Module Overview

This module addresses debates in photographic theory and criticism from the 1940s to the 1990s under the headings of Modernism to Postmodernism and after. It traces a history of practice from the high point of social documentary in the 1930s and 1940s in the US primarily through the following decades, its entry into the museums and its embrace by the commercial art market as postmodernist photography. It will also consider the arrival of photography ‘theory’ in the 1970s which marks a challenge and critical moment in how the photographic is conceptualised. The mobilisation of psychoanalysis, semiotics and feminist critique will be examined as crucial to theory informing practice. Into the 1990s, in the wake of this, an appraisal of ‘a post-postmodern’ shift marked by a ‘return of the real’ in projects such as critical realism amongst others.