This seminar introduces students to major developments in the legal history of photography in transatlantic society, from the first law cases involving photography in 1840 to contemporary legal debates about such topics as cameras in the courtroom, sexting, surveillance, photographing police, dash cam and body cam videos, and more.
This course introduces students both to historical developments in photography and to a range of different theoretical tools and approaches for using photographs as modes to explore and think critically and creatively about history.
In this roundtable forum, published in The American Historical Review (4 Jan. 2022), I convened five scholars to discuss the collected essays in Ambivalent: Photography and Visibility in African History (2019). Matthew Fox-Amato studies how powerful photographs can be as evidence when combined with other kinds of sources such as Read more…
I was interviewed by The New York Times about a trend among some police departments and news outlets to end the practice of releasing and publicizing mug shots of people accused of crimes, absent an immediate public safety reason to do so. I discussed how these mug shots have been Read more…
In this opinion piece co-authored with Peter Rutland, I reflect on the National Archives’ censoring of the messages on protest signs in a photo taken at the Women’s March in January 2017. This action was swiftly and universally condemned by professional historians and curators. It both transpired in our era Read more…
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In 2018, Gerard Lange, Associate Professor of Art & Design at Barton College in North Carolina, began publishing a quarterly printed journal that features the work of photography educators and students, titled Focal Plane. The purpose of this publication is to highlight the work that teachers perform both in and Read more…
Tucker, “Photography in the Making of Modern Science,” in Handbook of Photography Studies, ed. Gil Pasternak (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2019), pp. 235-254. Learn more here. he Handbook of Photography Studies is an overview of the field of photography studies, examining its thematic interests, dynamic research methodologies and multiple scholarly Read more…
