50 Years of the Department of Photography

The human face and figure are among the most established forms in visual art. Photography naturally inherited these tropes and—in the words of sociologist Max Weber—quickly set out to disenchant them during the first decades of its existence. Whether the photographic portrait was pasted in a family album or displayed on an ID card, it became a symbol of civic identity. And being able to take such photos remains among the most essential skills of photographers to this day. FAMU’s Department of Photography is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and its students have decided to approach the technical imaging of corporeality in a slightly different way. Bodies dissolved in data flows become skewed, deconstructed, and multiplied, drawing attention to the latent aspects of the digital avatars that increasingly represent us in the virtual realm. Their projects show how the expansion of the digital world and our own representations have also carried over certain familiar negative aspects, such as unpaid labor or various types of gender stereotypes.

GAMU