ARTH 546: Seminar in Contemporary Art
Theories of Photography
with Terri Weissman
Fall 2022

Taught during overlapping multiple pandemics, this graduate seminar introduces students to current debates around the meaning of photographic images and objects, including (but not limited to) photography’s relationship to desire, evidence, white supremacy, colonization, and institutional histories. The class, which is co-taught by Amy Powell, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Krannert Art Museum (KAM) and Terri Weissman, associate professor of contemporary art, takes KAM’s photography collection as its point of departure and primary object of study. Classes will periodically meet in the museum and students will have regular access to the collection as they engage in their research and writing. The class will focus on collaborative research and a class project (e.g., a written collection history or exhibition proposal) may replace individual research papers.  

One goal of this course is to help critically assess the photography collection at KAM and to discuss ways to organize, display, and develop it; all while keeping in mind photography’s intimate relationships to power alongside the medium’s transformational possibilities.

Students in this course organized two installations of photographs from KAM’s collection. In the first half of 2023, themes of labor and borders occupied the museum’s entry wall in Perpetual Upkeep organized by Hannah Brown, Ivan Cherniakov, Sharayah L. Cochran, Brittany Leatherman, Sam Veremchuk, and Savannah Wills.

During the 2023-2024 academic year, Present Tensions comprised a section of Art Since 1948 in the modern and contemporary art galleries, interrogating evidence of Native erasure and settler claims to land in KAM’s photography collection. This second iteration was organized by Hannah Brown, Sharayah L. Cochran, and Savannah Wills.