Overview of Sessions

Sessions will concentrate on learning about different graphic processes; examining the social and cultural history of popular art genres; and the interpretation and incorporation of graphics, including ephemera, with urban subject matter to be used as examples and models in teaching.

Processes to be examined include:

• Intaglio
• Wood engraving
• Lithography
• Photography
  • Daguerreotypes/Ambrotypes/Tintypes
  • Albumen
  • Gelatin Silver
• Photomechanical
  • Halftone

The sessions will also incorporate previously assigned readings and videos, original materials from the Library Company’s collections, and a field trip to The Halide Project for a demonstration of historic photographic processes.

8AM-9AM:

Registration and light breakfast

9AM-10:30PM:

Welcome and Introduction

Backgrounds of participants and instructors

Overall goals for seminar

10:30AM-10:45AM:

Break

10:45AM-12:30PM:

Graphics collections at Library Company of Philadelphia

Visual Culture Program

Review and description by participants of selected graphic item

12:30PM-1:45PM:

Lunch on Own

1:45PM-3:00 PM:

Review of pre-readings/video

History of photography in Philadelphia

3:00PM-5PM:

Field Trip to The Halide Project (including travel)

8:30AM-9AM:

Light Breakfast

9AM-12:30PM:

(including break 10:30-10:45AM)

Review of pre-readings/videos

History of printing processes in Philadelphia

Models and tools for close-looking and graphics research

12:30PM-1:45PM:

Lunch on Own

2PM-3:30PM:

Triangulation and the Urban World in the Parlor

Wendy Woloson, guest lecturer

Session will focus on the “triangulation” process of bringing in visual culture, material culture, and textual sources to help us understand various pasts, and particularly pasts of the subaltern, people who tended not to be represented in mainstream source material. Dr. Woloson will discuss the use of visual culture for historical research, and in particular its value in recovering the lives of those otherwise unrecorded.

3:30PM-3:45PM:

Break

3:45PM-5PM:

Tutorial Time in Cassatt House Conference Room and Graphic Arts Department (Groups of six; ca. 30-45 minutes each room)

Research and preparation of revised description of select graphic displayed Day One

Exercise outcomes: Blog Posts/Instagram posts/Research presentations of revised description

5PM

Dinner

8:30AM-9AM:

Light Breakfast

9AM-1PM:

Session will focus on the close-looking of maps as graphics, as well as bird’s eye views, business panoramas, advertising prints, and vernacular photographs

Presentations of exercise outcomes

1:00PM-2:30PM:

Lunch on Own

Optional: 2:30PM-4:45PM

Research in Graphic Arts Collection