Faculty First Year Seminars 191FYS8 - Reading Images, Texts, Ourself

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 various perspectives on photography, including some of Susan Sontag's classic essays from her book, On Photography; Teju Cole on portraiture; Gordon Parks on seeing; and more. We will further complicate our understandings by reading about and analyzing essays on contemporary image production and consumption on mediums such as Instagram. 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 (R1ST)