Visual Trajectories: Forces Shaping Advertising, Landscape, and Popular Visual Imagery

This course emphasizes the chief forces now shaping the American understanding of everyday forms, such as the manipulation of aesthetic standards by advertising and Hollywood imagery; the perfection of powered flight and the aerial view; the importance of snapshot photography in relation to home video; the post-1960s fascination with outdoor privacy; contemporary and potential spatial disorientation resulting from computer-aided electronic media; the post-1920 retreat of well-educated people into wilderness; the shaping of gender roles and self-image through clothing design and fashion shifts; and the long-term impact of national advertising campaigns on American notions of quality, uniqueness, proportion, and pleasure as reflected in ordinary visual realms.