TOPICS: THE CAMERA DOESN'T LIE: PHOTO IN POST TRUTH ERA in Spring 2020 (CM2091A)

This multi-disciplinary focuses on the fraught history of photography’s relationship to truth and objectivity, from its early beginnings to current trends of manipulation and fabrication. With the rise of “fake-news” and increasingly convincing image manipulation and synthesis, the question of what, exactly, is “real” has become a more and more pressing question, with ethical, political and cultural ramifications. Beginning with philosophical notions of the real and photography’s complicated relationship with reality, we will move on through the history of image manipulation, from the crude airbrushing of the Soviet Period, onto Photoshop, misinformation and current developments in image synthesis. Humans are inherently visual beings. It is, in fact, our most powerful mode of communication: we have only to look at the influence of image-based platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, advertising and YouTube to see proof of visual power in action. Reporting and documenting global conflict, for example, is made simultaneously easier and more difficult due to the wide-spread accessibility of methods of recording and decimating information. It also spawns a secondary conflict: that of the ethical, pragmatic and technical difficulties of verifying the truth of visual evidence. Ultimately, it leads to a larger question of what it means to “believe” a photograph, whether that is possible or even desirable, and if not, what do we propose in its place? Through critical thinking and observation applied to hands-on projects, assignments will activate students’ agency and creativity as digital global citizens. Over the course of the semester, students will work in groups and individually on a selection of assigned images and asked to apply the concepts we discuss in order to manipulate our understanding of them.