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FUBiS Term III: Berlin Today: Photographing the Multicultural City
(Kurs # 2.6)
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Typ: |
B Track |
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Dozent(en): |
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Sprache: |
Englisch |
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Veranstaltungsumfang: |
48 (6 Kontaktstunden pro Tag) |
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Bonuspunkte: |
4 Credit Points |
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Anzahl Plätze: |
18 |
Inhalt
In this course we will examine various Berlin districts on foot asking questions like: Where did these people come from? What are they doing here? What can we understand about them from what we see? And, most important for us: how might I photograph them to bring out what I know and discover things I don't know?
To answer these questions you will need to bring a digital camera so you can make quick prints and post to your blog before class. You will need good shoes, a water bottle, city map, and lots of curiosity to take advantage of our scheduled walking tours. You will need to bring your reading glasses and a note pad to read articles on Jewish, multicultural, and post-wall Berlin. And you'll want to bring a laptop (or some sort of backup media if you use the university's public pc's and mac's) and a little patience for technology to learn how to create web albums and photo blogs.
Our evening field trips will be based on a number of planned tours of multicultural Berlin (the working-class districts of Neu Koelln, Wedding, and Kreuzberg) and the new Berlin (as we walk from one side of the former wall to the other, to Friedrichshain and Prenzlauerberg). We will photograph housing and shops, signage and graffitti, people in cafes and on the street, and landscape views that take in any one of a number of remarkable transitions. You will be expected to visit some of these same places on your own and at different times of the day to appreciate the differences of light and time of day and develop more complex views of the city.
We will explore how to look beyond the usual tourist attractions and picture-taking strategies to find instead evidence of a very rich urban landscape and do so with the same discipline you would bring to any other academic course. We will explore transitional zones as those between the old DDR districts, where not everything has been paved over, painted over, and made to look the same -- places that still have that "dark, dirty, DDR feeling" -- and the new unified Berlin, the "city of talents", including signs of the new economies in media, IT, bio-technology, and corruption. We'll explore immigrant Turkish communities as they spill over onto old German and young German communities. We'll explore the new Berlin economies popping up in the middle of all this, too.
We will develop even more depth by reading some political history, cultural history, sociology, and novelistic commentaries and write brief (one page) summaries that will lead you to view what you are seeing from a larger historical perspective. We will train ourselves as well to walk in the footsteps of the artistic giants, beginning with the humble Heinrich Zille, as they have solved the major problems of subject and design and invite us to apprentice ourselves to their craft.
This class welcomes beginning as well as advanced photographers, amateurs as well as aspiring professionals, and is designed to help students from very different backgrounds learn from each other. Students will be expected to attend all scheduled meetings and arrive in class prepared, which means having uploaded their recent work onto their web albums and making prints to share in class. Students will follow a number of tutorials designed to help them develop a digital workflow, including the use of simple photo editors, like Picasa, and standard color laser printers, and resulting in proof sheets and prints to share with each other. Classroom discussion will include detailed review of each student's work to the end of identifying how differently we each might interpret our subjects as well as supporting the development of each student's unique interests and style. You are welcome to bring sophisticated digital equipment, if you have it, but among our best students have been those armed with the cheapest cameras: our emphasis will be on mastering enough of the basic techniques of exposure, composition, and digital processing to enable you to use the medium to explore the world and produce coherent images to record your progress and share with others.
Course blogger and syllabus: http://berlintoday2008.blogspot.com/
Class meetings: Laboratories and class discussion will be held in the Silberlaube, Mondays and Thursdays from 9-12:30. Scheduled field trips will be held evenings on those days, from 6:30-8:00pm. For every hour of scheduled classes students should plan on spending at least two on their own photographing, printing, reading, and preparing very short written reviews of the readings for class discussion.
Student profile
This course welcomes both beginning and advanced photography students, and among our most successful students have been those from such other fields as sociology, computer science, literature, art and art history, and criminology.
Zielgruppe
This course welcomes both beginning and advanced photography students, and among our most successful students have been those from such other fields as sociology, computer science, art history, and criminology.
