This course examines the intersections of photography and race in the United States, focusing primarily on the twentieth-century. Students will be introduced to critical concepts in the field of photography, such as visibility, performativity, the gaze, and the ‘scopic regime,’ and to a range of historical and contemporary debates about the significance of vision in marking race in the context of the United States. Questions that we will ask throughout the course are: How does photography contribute to the discourse of race? What is the role of visual images in our perception of race and racialized bodies? How does the visual function as evidence of the markings of race? We will approach the subject by examining racialized bodies in photography, and the ways the medium deals with race as subject matter in the public sphere. We will explore a variety of photographic practices and uses, including family photographs; advertisements; “scientific” daguerreotypes of African American slaves in the nineteen-century; 1940s government photography projects; 1960s photojournalism and documentary work of photographers like Charles Moore and Gordon Parks; activist photography of such groups as the Black Panthers and the Black Lives Matter; and artworks by contemporary photographers, such as Lorna Simpson, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Coco Fusco. The course is organized thematically around a series of case studies and their socio-historical contexts, including but not limited to slavery, abolition, and the Civil Rights movement.