Faculty First Year Seminars 191FYS6 - Deep Looking

Images abound. They fill our social media feeds, they are staged to convey our aspirations for ourselves, and they increasingly hold powerful sway over our cultural discourses. Critic Sean O?Hagan has called photography ?the medium of our time, not just defining our globally connected digital image culture, but propelling it.? In this class, we will practice Dr. Jennifer Roberts? concept of ?deceleration? by slowly reading Susan Sontag?s classic book, On Photography, and contemplating her theories on photography and images. We will complicate these understandings by reading about and analyzing essays on contemporary image production and consumption on mediums such as Instagram and TikTok. And in order to hone our visual and theoretical literacy, we will create, share, and analyze our own photographs. Since this class is a first-year seminar, we will also practice effective reading strategies, learn how to prepare for tests, discuss what it means to be a college student, share personal wellness strategies, and co-create a comfortable, open-hearted community devoted to exploring the deeper meanings of the images in our lives. Perhaps we will also get to the bottom of why, when taking selfies, we make that particular face. You know the one.

First-Year - Fresh/Soph