This seminar focuses on key concepts and problems within the history of critical and theoretical writing about photography. Concepts such as aura, optical unconscious, index, archive, and document are analyzed as historical terms pointing, for example, to the changing conditions of social experience in Modernity, and as critical constructs which address the specificity of photography as a cultural and artistic practice in relation to modernist and postmodernist discussions of art. Each week the discussion will center on a particular case study such as the 1955 MOMA exhibition The Family of Man, the typological project of August Sander, and the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière by Jean-Martin Charcot.