During the 1970s and 1980s in Britain and in the United States political photographers and photography theorists were invested in questions around ‘representation’, documentary photography and identity politics. Such photography practitioners often challenged photography’s supposed relationship with the ‘real’ as well as employed semiotic, psychoanalytic, feminist and postcolonial discourses in their analysis. The engagement with these discourses were a conscious break away from modernist debates which framed art works as aesthetic objects removed from everyday life. This course explores these new politicized notions in the practice of photographers like Barbara Kruger, Mary Yates, Martha Rosler, and in writings by photography theorists like Kobena Mercer, Rosalind Krauss, Stuart Hall, John Tagg and Laura Mulvey.

The 1990s nevertheless, notably marked a shift in political photography and art practices as they moved away from earlier strategies pertaining to ‘the politics of representation’ towards performativity, playfulness, process, participation, and interactive encounter between spectator and art work. This course examines these thematic and strategic shifts in works by photographers and artists like Santiago Sierra, Sharon Hayes, and Tania Bruguera who exhibited their work both inside and outside the museum. Such works are discussed in reference to texts by theorists like Nicolas Bourriaud, Claire Bishop, Michael Warner, and Judith Butler.

The political performative aspects are also dealt with in this course by examining tourist photography, the family album, graffiti and street parties. Additionally explored are disruptive art strategies executed in the public sphere by cultural collective like the Yes Men and the Center for Tactical Magic.