Do not use any AI or generated responses please.
Short Essay Questions
1. In class lectures we discussed two key features (veracity and reproducibility) which made the photographic image different from previous image-making technologies (painting, drawing, etc.). Describe these two features and their historical development, and explain how they are reflected in our cultural experience of the photographic image.
2. When photography was invented in 1839 there were two very different, existing, attitudes about the “truth” of visual images. What were these attitudes, and how did they shape early perceptions of photography? (consider the comparison or relationship of artwork and photography)
3. What role did photography play in the regulation of crime during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How was photography used to regulate criminal behavior, and how did it reflect larger cultural anxieties about the degeneration of the European type? What techniques were employed in the visual analysis of criminal bodies, and what two general purposes did they serve, as evidenced in the work of figures such as Francis Galton, Cesare Lombroso and Alphonse Bertillon?
4. What role did photography play in the regulation of industrial labor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries? What techniques were employed in the visual analysis of worker’s bodies, and how did they relate to the administrative techniques of scientific management or Taylorism and the division of labor?
5. How was the experience of cultural and ethnic difference in the United States mediated through new forms of urban entertainment and spectacle (stereoscopic images, cabinet cards, amusement parks, human zoos, expositions, etc.) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? And how did these images relate to ongoing fears about immigration at the time?
Long Essay Question
Answer the question below (2-3 pages). If you cite additional sources (essays, books) include a footnote that lists the name of the publication, author, title, date and page number or other source.
We outlined three different types of images produced as part of the western expansion of railroads in the United States following the Civil War (by photographers such as Carlton Watkins, William Henry Jackson and Edward Curtis). Describe these three types of images, and the role that each of them played in the settlement of the west. (Refer to Question 1 Material)
