New course: Decolonizing the Camera

This Fall the Newcomb Art Department is offering a new course ARST 3011: DECOLONIZING THE CAMERA, taught by visiting assistant professor Shabez Jamal.

In this course students will examine their own visual practice through the framework of decolonization. Through this process, students will engage with topics of race, representation, and power, while they build a visual practice that takes into account the complicated colonial legacy of photography. We will investigate the ways in which the camera has historically been used as a weapon of violence against those deemed as the Other. By approaching photography in such a way, students will gain a better understanding of how the camera works in racial time, which will result in a more informed and intentional practice of art-making. Throughout the course, students will engage in critiques, readings, and visual analyses that will support the cultivation of language to directly address the formation of otherness in image-making. Simultaneously students will be looking at contemporary lens-based artists who are working to correct this legacy from behind the camera in order to leverage the medium of photography as a tool of liberation. Students will employ these contemporary techniques to develop their own artistic practice.

Shabez Jamal is an interdisciplinary artist based in New Orleans, LA. His work, rooted in still portraiture, experimental video, and performance, interrogates physical, political, and social-economical space by using queerness, not as a means of speaking about sexuality, but as a catalyst to challenge varying power relations. Often turning the lens on himself, Jamal utilizes self-portraiture as a means of radically redefining the parameters of racial and sexual identity. 

M/W 3- 5:50pm, 204 Woldenberg Art Center