PHOTOMANIA

The exhibition grows out of a class for freshmen, Photomania, that introduces new William & Mary students to photography and to undergraduate-level study in the liberal arts by combining readings and lectures in the history and theory of photography with hands-on demonstrations and original work in contemporary and historical photographic techniques.  Students learn the fundamentals of photographic making alongside the achievements and development of historical photography.  This combination of approaches to photography helps students see that photography is not just something given—a feature of their smartphones—but a historical, evolving dialogue between certain changing technical possibilities and corresponding array of uses or needs for those possibilities.  At any given moment, photography is the meeting between the technologies and their uses.