Global Arc

In a digital world, this course promotes hand-made printed images. Students will examine two kinds of printmaking: relief and intaglio. To make images that matter, students will learn to cut blocks, fashion stencils, plan and execute color layers, etch and drypoint copper plates, and understand the range of mark making possibilities available in printmaking. Students are encouraged to draw regularly to cultivate themes and content, and to develop a basic knowledge of print in contemporary art. Woodblocks have been around since the 8th century; etchings for 500 years. Students will make something completely new from something old.

This studio class engages with photographs that have been deemed difficult, wrong, shocking, inappropriate, and/or subversive. Does photography have unique moral obligations that are distinct from other mediums? What are the moral and ethical responsibilities of photographers today? Discussion is foundational to this course, with the goal of having open, generous, and generative conversations. Students will develop a semester long individual project that culminates in a final portfolio of photographs. Students will engage with multiple case studies of photographs and photographers whose work has drawn controversy drawing from global examples.

This course will examine the practice of camera-less photography. Students will work in black and white and color in the analog darkroom with a wide spectrum of processes - photograms, lumen and cliché-verre prints, chemigrams, and digitally produced negatives. The course will require independent and collaborative assignments augmented by readings in the history of camera-less and abstract photography and by visiting artists.

This course is a history of photography tied to practice and designed to provide a deeper understanding of the medium's historic timeline through engagement with physical processes. Students will be introduced to the practices involving chemistry and optics that drove the development of multiple types of imagery retrospectively known as "photography." The emphasis will be on materiality and photographs as socially salient objects. Students will create their own visual statements and may mix hand-made processes with modern intermediaries such as digital negatives for hand-applied emulsions or scanning negatives and printing digitally.

This course will examine the practical and theoretical issues of photographic portraiture. Photography's pervasiveness has described and defined notions of identity, race, and gender. We will explore the history of the photographic portraiture as well as work of contemporary artists working in a post-modern age where representation and identity are deconstructed. Students will learn technical skills such as large format camera use, studio lighting, and printing. Assignments will explore conceptual strategies, and students will exhibit their work for periodic critique.

This course will explore ways that language can take on material properties and how objects can have syntax and be "read". Through studio assignments, readings, and discussions, students will investigate the idea of language as a tangible material that can be sliced, bent, inserted, reproduced, embedded, and scattered, as in the work of such modern artists as Guillaume Apollinaire, Susan Howe, Marcel Broodthaers, or Jenny Holzer. In each instance, our perception of meaning through language, and our perception of lived experience through material form, are both altered by their engagement with the other.

Over the past fifty years, many visual artists have taken up the process and methods of academic research as an impetus for works of art. Through readings, discussions, case studies, and studio projects, students in this class will engage the immediate context of the University as source material for their artworks, and as a means of exploring the effect that research and knowledge production might have on contemporary artistic practice. How does art produce knowledge? How does the knowledge it produces differ from that of other disciplines? In what ways do artists and researchers use similar source material to different ends?

Students will learn techniques of wildlife surveillance photography using remote cameras to photograph animal populations on and around Princeton's campus. The photographs and apparatus will be considered as both ecological research and works of art. As such, the methods and results will be critically examined for population index studies as well as philosophical ramifications. A final exhibition of the images will highlight the secret wilderness of the area while posing questions about our relationship to non-human animals and the narrative ramifications of the gaze of surveillance photography.

This course will examine photography's ongoing negotiation of evolving color technologies. Students will use film and digital cameras to explore color as a physiological phenomenon and a technology of image reproduction as well as a virtual construct to be created at will. The analog darkroom and the digital lab will be used to make prints for periodic critiques. A range of new tools will be introduced, including sheet film development, less used Photoshop tools, and analogue color pigment printing. This course will require independent and collaborative assignments, augmented by field trips, readings and discussion.

This course is designed for students who are interested in learning the fundamentals of working with clay. A wide variety of hand-building techniques will be taught, enabling students to make utilitarian vessels as well as sculptural forms. Students will learn about glazing and colored engobe application methods and how to operate electric and gas kilns. Studio work will be complemented by readings, field trips, and slide presentations.