*2026 Spring *NEW* American Spaces
CLASS NUMBER:
760-02
INSTRUCTOR:
TIME:
Thursdays, 3:20-5:50 PM
LOCATION:
GLS House, Room 0202, 2114 Campus Drive
This seminar can be thought of as a query into the visual history of the United States through photography. This course centers on the work of photographers active at different moments in time, all of whom take the American landscape and its people as their subject. These artists would include Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, Alec Soth, LaToya Ruby-Frazier, Anastasia Samoylova, and other practitioners. We would not only consider their photographs but the agency of photography itself as a communicative modality. How stable are photographs as historical documents? What can they tell us about the meaning of Americanness? Is it possible to delimit “space” in a still photograph? These questions will serve as a kind of compass to both frame and direct our inquiry. In addition to contemporary photography theory, we will consider the early canon of criticism, including the writing of Susan Sontag, John Berger, and Roland Bartes. More recent scholarship, like that of Ariella Azoulay in the Civil Contract of Photography (2008), which essentially establishes the audience as a party to the photographic encounter, will be particularly important to our interpretive analysis.
We will approach this course as both theorists and practitioners, because one mode of inquiry informs the other. If, as photography theorist David Campany writes, “photographs confuse as much as fascinate, conceal as much as reveal, and distract as much as compel,” then what better way to fully understand the medium than to practice it? For this reason, you will compile a portfolio of pictures over the course of the semester, which you make, that describes your idea of an American space. Please keep in mind that the principal idea behind this assignment is to theorize photography from a participant perspective.
As theorists, we will explore and interpret the range of meaning produced through a series of photographs that are narratively arranged in photobooks. These photobooks might include Flint is Family in Three Acts (2022) by LaToya Ruby Frazier, Sleeping by the Mississippi (2008) by Alec Soth, or Mike Brodie’s A Period of Juvenile Prosperity (2012). Our ultimate purpose is to think about how an American space is defined by both the photographer and the subject matter of the photograph. You can expect to write about and discuss individual photographs, their narrative sequencing, and both the limits and expanse of visual language. Perhaps no other medium has been more impactful or even more germane to modern culture.
John Bechtold is a former American military officer and veteran of the Iraq War. An alumnus of Graduate Liberal Studies at Duke, he holds PhD in American studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he lectured on war and society. His first monograph, U.S. Militarism and the Terrain of Memory: Negotiating Dead Space (Routledge 2024), investigates the mediation of contemporary war. As an extension of the project, he curated a photography exhibition featuring the work of emerging photographers from Iraq. A portfolio is archived at Duke University.
Spring 2026, Art, Art History and Visual Studies, Arts