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Apr 19, 2024
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Goucher College 2020-2021 Undergraduate Catalogue PLEASE NOTE: This is an archived catalog. Programs are subject to change each academic year.
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CPEA 209 - Document This! Telling Stories about the Real World Using Photographs and Words. (4 Cr.) (GCR Arts area)
With Reality TV, the 24/7/365 news cycle, and the almost manic documentation of daily life on Instagram and YouTube, you’d think we’d documented the world to death. But our communities are full of untold stories, perspectives, and lives aching to be exposed to the light. In this course, you’ll use cameras as tools to engage socially and politically with the world, while using approaches from the fields of documentary photography, anthropology, and art. During the semester, you will shoot and create projects alone, in pairs, and in groups. You will immerse yourselves in documentary practices to develop stories with images and text, you’ll be exposed to the work of documentary photographers, artists, and photojournalists as well as to writing about the documentary tradition. You will learn how to read photographs to gain an understanding of “visual literacy,” and you’ll grapple with the ethics of your editorial positions and actions. Emphasis will be on process (drafting proposals, conducting research, gaining access, photographing), and on practice (editing and building sequencing skills). Through trial and error, you will learn which ideas translate visually, which do not, and why. Be prepared to make mistakes, learn by weekly assignments and by iteration (returning to the same subject matter over and over). Your camera will be, as photographer Dorothea Lange stated, “a tool for learning how to see without a camera.”. Students are limited to one CPE course per semester.
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