Faculty of Fine Arts

In Photography and Image, students are given technological training, namely in the introduction to the photographic device, through procedures implicit in laboratory practice, such as: handling of equipment and materials used in the context of small and medium format photography, lighting, techniques for developing and enlarging on film and paper. This learning is complemented with primitive photography techniques and research oriented towards biodegradable processes of photographic capture and development. Along with the technological training component, the lectures include an introduction to a history of photographic images through their copies, emphasizing their materiality and the student’s face-to-face contact with different printing typologies, from daguerreotypes, cyanotypes, wet collotypes, phototypes, albumin, autochromes, antithromes, bromides, polaroids, photocopies, etc. ; a second module introduces a history of cameras, with learning and access to different formats, brands and accessories of photographic equipment from the FBA.UP archive.

Photography Practices has as main goal the conception and production of an individual and original photographic project, enabling the student to develop an autonomous and critical thinking in his technical and conceptual development, in order to recognize the specificity of the photographic medium. It also aims to promote advanced knowledge in contemporary photographic publishing and exhibition practices.

In Photography and Editing, the contribution of the history of the book to the historiography of the photographic medium is analyzed and distinctive photographic publications are identified in terms of printing, sequence and respective dissemination, both in the national and international contexts.

Along with the creation of a publishing project in the area of photography, the book assembly is studied in terms of format, plans, booklets, printing techniques, selection, sequence and binding.

Prioritizing a cultural historiography against the positivist model of early histories, we analyze how the reclassification of photographic archives changes the discursive condition of photography and the nature of its reception and circulation. The diversity of the nature of the archive – museological, commercial or private – and of the spaces that handle it – libraries, commercial spaces, public or private institutions, and the way in which it directly reflects the cultural dimension of the photographic object, without an exclusive subjection to its documental function – are considered. Finally and above all, the mutual inflection of the history and theory of photography with the plastic arts is highlighted, and the way in which the invention of the former radically disturbed and altered the action of the latter.