Fall 2019, IMA Major Electives, Media & Entertainment (Old Structure), Undergraduate

Documentary Strategies: Documenting Downtown Using New Media (PHTI-UT 1006)

IMA students are welcome to fill out the non-major course request form if they are interested in taking this course (this is the workflow we use for all interested non-photo majors).
This course systematically examines downtown New York City neighborhoods, businesses, institutions and communities. Using new media technology, such as 360 degree photography and video, augmented reality, and spatial sound, students will document histories that have unfolded around New York University’s Greenwich Village campus: the evolution of Bowery, changing Chinatown, the diminishing family-owned businesses; disappearing sub cultures of the East and West Village; Italian, Jewish, Dominican and Puerto Rican enclaves in the Lower East Side. The students learn how to work together in teams and with families and institutions, and how to gain access to other cultures, using new media.

Prerequisite: Photography & Imaging II, or permission of the department. This course considers the creative possibilities of a variety of documentary strategies. The editing of images, their structuring into an essay form, the interpretation of their various meanings, and the impact of the documentary essay on the world are all discussed. Students are assigned a range of problems that explore visual description and interpretation ranging from the photojournalistic to the autobiographical. In addition each student devotes a significant amount of time to producing a single-subject documentary project. Classes are lecture-demonstration with critiques of student work and regular presentations of documentary photographs made throughout history, in different cultures and for different reasons, including the personal and the societal. Each student must have a still camera or a video camera. This course requires a nonrefundable lab fee.

Photography and Imaging (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Sections (Fall 2019)

PHTI-UT 1006-000 (15273)09/03/2019 – 12/13/2019 Tue5:00 PM – 9:00 PM (Late afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by