This course will consider the rapidly changing role and implications of digitized images as medium and documentation–within the arts and as a social phenomenon. What does it mean to make and frame photographs in a world saturated with instantaneously dispersed images? How has this promiscuity reversed the terms of documentation–driving action rather than simply capturing it? What are the implications for the value of a photograph as material object and the darkroom as a place of craft? We will anchor our inquiry with a physical history of photography as a practice, an intellectual history of its theories. Readings, including foundational texts, contemporary scholarship and popular criticism, will inform our discussions and close looking at photographs. As an R1B, the course will take this subject to develop critical reading, thinking, and composition skills. We will use a multi-staged and peer-reviewed approach to researching and writing a final ten to twelve-page paper.