New Romantics: Horror, Beauty and Ruins in Modern Photography

This program will look at the Romantic movement of the 18th and 19th centuries and then turn that gaze upon our modern ways of making and looking at images. Romanticism's preoccupations often reflected the neuroses and fears of their time: bodily horror and transformation, decay, reverence for the power of the natural world, the ruins of antiquity and an overwhelming adoration of physical beauty. This program will use film and digital photography to answer just how and why these Romanticist themes have re-emerged as dominant themes in contemporary art, modern popular media and imagery (movies, TV, advertising, etc.) as well as the vernacular photography that makes up our current visual lexicon. Students will learn how to use the photography lighting studio, as well as cross-platform editing techniques such as film scanning. This program will primarily be composed as a studio-based program, and students can expect to spend a good deal of time working individually or in collaborative pairs in the lighting studio, darkroom, and digital editing suite.