Photography and History: Dictatorship & Resistance in Latin America

This seminar explores the power of photographic images as 20th century Latin America suffered from and resisted dictatorships and fought for democracy. It opens with the world's first fully photographed and filmed revolution in Mexico (1910-17), and then investigates photographic practice in Cuba, Chile, & Brazil after 1945. While used as a tool of oppression, photographic images will also be explored as vital weapons against human rights violations and fuel for popular democratic insurgencies. This course offers freshmen a chance to share the excitement of research in action, on learning with rather than teaching at, as they improve their skill in 'reading' and contextualizing images while debating what truths, if any, a photographer can communicate, how, and under what circumstances?