Photography of the Middle East

In this course, we will work closely with Special Collections and the Middlebury College Museum of Art to survey 19th and 20th century photography of the Middle East. We will consider indigenous studios as well as foreign photographers who traveled to the region and circulated their photographs as visual knowledge of distant cultures, peoples, monuments, landscapes, and experiences. Looking at a range of materials, including travel photography, studio portraits, and government- and commercially-commissioned photographic albums, we will examine how photographs visually construct notions of race, gender, class, religion, and cultural otherness. We will then turn to the ways in which contemporary artists are archiving historical photographs and appropriating them in contemporary practices.