Wednesdays from 6:00-9:00pm ET on Zoom
January 13, 20, 27, February 3, 2027
Fee: $500
Space limited to 8
Across four sessions, we will explore the history of photography through its four predominant genres: Landscape, Documentary, Portraiture, and Still Life. Distinct genres emerged as a way of categorizing and analyzing painting, and early photography responds to this history. But photographers quickly embrace their unique medium and begin charting their own paths and traditions. By introducing canonical works in the history of photography, this workshop will explore the evolution, limits, and possibilities inherent in each of these genres.
In addition to studying the context of important moments in the history of photography, participants will also learn to analyze photographs and glean information from the image itself. By focusing on the limitations each genre naturally imposes, we will explore how artists engage with and push against constraints. Finally, students will explore these genres for themselves by bringing in images we will analyze and discuss together.
Classes will include lectures on the history of photography, discussions and group analyses of images, as well as constructive feedback on student-made images. Students will come away with a broader understanding of the history of photography and a deeper appreciation of how photographic traditions can inform, challenge, and expand their own ways of seeing and making images.
January 13 — Landscape. Some of the earliest photographs were landscapes, and this genre still dominates much of how we relate to the world photographically. We will look at Carleton Watkins, Edward Weston, and Richard Misrach, among others.
January 20 — Documentary. A genre unique to photography thanks to the medium’s evidentiary promise. We will look at Henry Fox Talbot, Walker Evans, and Sebastião Salgado, among others.
January 27 — Portraiture. How do we capture each other in pictures? How does the camera change how we fashion ourselves? We will look at Julia Margaret Cameron, Richard Avedon, and Sally Mann, among others.
February 3 — Still Life. Sometimes viewed as the lowliest genre, photographers have used still life to explore materiality, consumerism, modernism, and nature. We will look at Imogen Cunningham, Irving Penn, and Josef Sudek, among others.
Elliot is the 2026–27 Smarthistory Postdoctoral Fellow. He received his Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College with the dissertation “What the Earth Remembers: Landscape and Materiality in Contemporary Art,” which examines how artists’ material engagement with land and place unearths new understandings of American history. He earned his B.F.A. from Rochester Institute of Technology in photography, as well as an M.A. in the History of Art from Williams College. Elliot has published essays in History of Photography and the edited volume Breaking the Silence: Methods of Writing Art History, and he was the 2021–22 George Gurney Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
