If the terms aperture or F-stop make you shake in the knees, this may be the course for you. We will look at photographs as art, not how to make photographs. We will start with a brief history of photography and think about how photographers were influenced by painters, and eventually the reverse. We’ll talk about what problems photographers might have encountered that might not be obvious to us in the 21st century. We’ll look at the impact that photography had on the naïve — imagine seeing photos of Civil War battles for the first time. We’ll look at nature as muse, and how science uses and affects photography. We’ll examine how photographers thought about their work as art, not just documentation. Most of all, we are going to have fun looking at images, many iconic, and analyze them the same way you might analyze a painting in a museum.
Charlie Goldberg is a former emergency room doctor who upon retirement left the unpredictable medical field to have a second career in the more secure position of art lover and teacher. He is a docent at two major art museums in San Francisco and has taught several courses on art and photography as well as lectured throughout the Bay Area on art topics.
