Stereos, and Lange, and Weimaraners, OH MY!

Great posts this week, people! I can't wait to see how many of you make your own stereographs using that how-to guide. And I must confess a couple of things. First: I, too, am very interested in Dorothea Lange and Migrant Mother. In fact, I wrote about that photograph in my dissertation in a chapter on images of heroic women from the 1930s and 1940s. Second: I used to think that William Wegman's Weimaraner photos were just insufferable. I admit, I didn't really "get them" and I didn't initially take the time to research them and give them a fighting chance to become visually or historically interesting to me. I did exactly what I beg students not to do...I became frustrated and made a snap judgment. (Really in retrospect I see that I was acting more like a curmudgeonly art critic than a thoughtful and open minded art history teacher...) Since my initial dismissal, I've come to delight in Wegman's dogs and even to include his photographic work in this class. (We'll talk about their merits and significance later in the semester.) I think that the way this class (and the history of photo in general) zigzags from portraiture to landscape to documenting wars to nudes to produce (yes, we will see some photographs of peppers...and other veggies and fruits) to a couple kissing to dogs to fashion models to red ceilings and so on makes this medium infinitely intriguing.

In that spirit of openness and zigzagging...let's continue on the blog this week to post whatever you find that relates to the history of photo and intrigues you. I'd be especially interested to read posts about your scrapbook progress and/or posts about contemporary photographers that you follow. In the next week or so you will need to begin to choose partners for your contemporary photographer research projects. So perhaps here on the blog you can post some ideas about which photographers you might like to research. You can talk to each other about that here online, in class, and elsewhere. I'll let you choose your own partners for this project and we'll talk more about that in the next week or two.

Keep blogging!
Lara