PHOTOGRAPHY AS MAPPING core course
Suzanne Strum / Diego Ferrari
This seminar begins with a workshop conducted by photographer Diego Ferrari that is followed by a series of lectures and discussions focused on the history of topographic photography, its development in current public commissions and its incorporation into contemporary art practices. The topographic tradition is an ancient concern with the depiction of place, especially towns, buildings, ruins and countryside’s and predates the invention of photography. Photography’s emergence coincides with the unbounding of the traditional city into the new urban amalgamations of the metropolis. The desire to chemically fix “drawings of light” was already suggested by the widespread use of prosthetic drawing apparatuses such as the Claude glass, the camera obscura and the camera lucida used by travelers to record their journeys. Urban photography acts as an agent of memory, documenting those places that are destined to change and to disappear. Landscape photography develops out of the desire to posess and copy the shifting singularity of nature, whereas aerial photography is a tool of territorial survey, expedition, and conquest. As such, the archive of the city and places over time has been one of photography´s ongoing projects. Topographic photography is an exploration of the idea of place and the human constructions that constitute this notion.