WWI and Its Legacies in Art and Photography
“We will glorify war,” declared the Italian poet Marinetti in the 1909 Futurist Manifesto. For Marinetti and his fellow writers and artists, military conflict held the promise of restoring a decadent Europe. Meanwhile, the new technology of photography was being deployed across the Ottoman Empire by European governments to document a declining empire with vast territory up for grabs. The outbreak of World War I, however, soon exposed the grim realities and failed promises of modernity and technologies of warfare. In this course we will consider how art and photography in Europe, America, and across the Ottoman Empire documented, portrayed, and confronted World War I, and the colonial and aesthetic legacies of the first industrialized global war in today’s world.