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PHOTOGRAPHY, REPRESENTATION, AND INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

PHOTOGRAPHY, REPRESENTATION, AND INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

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Photography emerged from the political, economic, social, and cultural upheaval known as Western modernity. This dramatic reordering transformed nearly every aspect of society, including visual culture. Scholars assert that industrial capitalism was a necessary precondition for photographic representation. As a new “middle” class between the aristocracy and the proletariat, the rising bourgeoisie demanded access to new forms of commemoration following the pictorial styles and conventions long used by royalty and the wealthy. This lecture explores the camera’s role in the democratization of visual culture beginning in the 1830s, debates about whether photographs were highbrow works of art or vulgar mechanical reproductions, and concerns that the commodification of imagery threatened the aura, prestige, and market value of traditional painting and portraiture.
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About the lecturer(s)

Willie Hiatt

Willie Hiatt, a Kentucky native, is an Associate Professor of History at Long Island University, Post Campus, and a former Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University (2019-20). He’s the author of The Rarified Air of the Modern: Airplanes and Technological Modernity in the Andes (Oxford, 2016). His current research is an oral history project examining how Maoist insurgents in Peru targeted high-tension towers during the Shining Path movement (1980-92).

Lecture Details

Program

Sessions

1 lecture(s)
Day & Time

Thursday, 10:30am - 12:30pm
Date(s)

May 25, 2023