Photographing Everyday and Every day Photography

In 1863, the poet Charles Baudelaire addressed artists of his time, demanding that they should abandon their preoccupation with classical, heroic, or religious beauty and focus on the aesthetics of the everyday: "There is in trivial life, in the daily changes of external life, a rapid movement that forces the artist to execute accordingly." Thus, in his essay "The Painter of Modern Life," Baudelaire shapes the image of the new artist whose concern is the everyday.

Nevertheless, it was the medium of photography, which Baudelaire detested, that helped direct the gaze of the modern art world to the spaces of the everyday. In this class, we will intertwine the history of photography with the history of everyday practices. We will focus on photographers and photographs that dealt with the aesthetics of the everyday, emphasizing everyday practices as zones of organization and disciplinarian, combined with privet tactics of subversion, and resistance. The discussions will explore the philosophical discourse that reveals, despite everything, the political power of everyday life in preserving the individual's freedom of thought and movement in the modern and contemporary age.