This is an archived course. A more recent version may be available at ocw.mit.edu.

Documentary Photography and Photojournalism: Still Images of a World in Motion

Photograph by Jacob Riis. Bandit's Roost, 1888, from How the Other Half Lives.

Bandit's Roost, 1888. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Instructor(s)

MIT Course Number

21W.749 / CMS.935

As Taught In

Spring 2009

Level

Undergraduate / Graduate

Course Description

Course Features

Course Description

This course is an introduction to the great tradition of documentary photography. Students learn to see the world around them in a new way and produce a documentary project. The course requires reading and writing about photography, as well as doing it on a regular basis. The class emphasis is on thinking about why people photograph, what photographs do and do not mean to us, and on doing documentary work, on telling stories with photographs. This is not a technical class, and it should not be considered an "introduction to photography." I work on the assumption that any student signing up for the class has at least a minimal sense of the difference between f stops and T stops, and can find his or her way around a camera. While there will be some technical discussion in class, it will be limited.

Related Content

B. Colen. 21W.749 Documentary Photography and Photojournalism: Still Images of a World in Motion, Spring 2009. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare), https://ocw.mit.edu (Accessed). License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA


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