Crash Course: Photography – The First 100 Years

Former Carnegie Museum of Art Curator of Photography, Linda Benedict-Jones, comes out of retirement to share her vast knowledge about the history of photography! As we share some of the first photographs ever made in William Henry Fox Talbot and the Promise of Photography, learn who came before and after Talbot and examine how images were made and enjoyed. Over the course of four weeks, we’ll take a trip through the first 100 years of the magical processes and the innovators behind them. Over this century, photographers changed the way we think, make, keep, and discuss images today.

Photography was announced to the world in 1839, in France and then a few months later in England. Accurate “likenesses” of people, and intriguing faraway places were available to the masses. This intensive course will explore the earliest image-makers Daguerre and Talbot, the Civil War photographs organized by Mathew Brady, the controversial portraiture of Julia Margaret Cameron and Lewis Carroll, the critically important social documentary photography of Jacob Riis and his successor, Lewis Hine, the Photo-Secessionists Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, the Harlem Renaissance photographs of James VanDerZee, the precisionist f.64 image-makers Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Edward Weston, the Decisive Moment photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, the photojournalism of Margaret Bourke-White and other important figures in the first 100 years of photography.