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 and discussed in order to expose students to different approaches to photography as an inherently interdisciplinary field of study. The seminar is thus concerned not only with the study of autonomous artistic photographs, but with the complex set of practices (institutional, cultural, ideological, professional, and aesthetic) that inform the production, dissemination, and reception of photographs. Topics include particular case studies from the history of photography such as the 1955 MOMA exhibition The Family of Man, the typological project of August Sander, the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière by Jean-Martin Charcot, as well as analysis of journalistic, activist, anthropological, and family photographs.