Robert Clarke-Davis

Large Format Photography introduces students to the concepts and aesthetics of working with a large-format view camera. Students will learn pre-visualization, camera movements, perspective control, large-format optics, and sheet film handling. Through flexible assignments, they are encouraged to develop a personal style while exploring traditional genres such as portraiture, landscape, studio, and architecture. Technical skills include view camera setup, the zone system, large-format scanning, and both analog and digital printing. Each student is assigned a 4x5 studio camera and has access to 8x10 and 4x5 field cameras, along with various optics and accessories.

Large Format Photography introduces students to the concepts and aesthetics of working with a large-format view camera. Students will learn pre-visualization, camera movements, perspective control, large-format optics, and sheet film handling. Through flexible assignments, they are encouraged to develop a personal style while exploring traditional genres such as portraiture, landscape, studio, and architecture. Technical skills include view camera setup, the zone system, large-format scanning, and both analog and digital printing. Each student is assigned a 4x5 studio camera and has access to 8x10 and 4x5 field cameras, along with various optics and accessories.

This course explores image-making through unconventional cameras, alternative processes, and creative interventions. From plastic lenses to pinhole photography, from cross-processing to digital manipulation, we will embrace and elevate the discarded, the imperfect, and the forgotten in an AI free zone. Using cameras like the Recesky twin-lens reflex, Konstruktor, Big Shot, Sunpet, and key ring cameras, as well as techniques such as zone plate and pinhole photography, students will push the limits of photographic perception. Inspired by figures like Henry Beck, we will champion low-tech and hybrid approaches, finding beauty in limitation and innovation in constraint. Through hands-on experimentation with both analog and digital tools, students will develop a personal approach to image-making that celebrates the unexpected.

This graduate level studio seminar course is a hybrid of reading, discussion, making and critique, designed to pursue positions in historical and contemporary philosophy, critical analysis, and current thought relevant to photography and visual literacy. Throughout the semester, the course aims to explore the past and future of visual media and to look at its discourse in relation to life as an artist in the greater realm of culture, society and politics. Course programming includes critical readings, short and informal writing assignments, work and research presentations.