The city has always been the stage where the most urgent conflicts of the times are discussed and negotiated. In this class, following a different photographic prompt each week, we will venture out into our cities and develop our own take on what's happening in our immediate surroundings today. Along the way, we’ll take a philosophical/political-theory perspective, represented in part by the Situationist International’s 1968 slogan of “beneath the pavement, the beach” (referring to the sand found beneath the cobblestones lifted by students to hurl at the police); Guy Debord’s dérive (an experimental behavior with goals including the study of the psychogeography of the city); and Walter Benjamin’s acute observer and investigator of the city, the flâneur. Different photographers have responded with wildly differing images to rapid changes found in modern cities and we’ll examine some of those — from the German photographer Michael Schmidt’s “Berlin Wall as a state of mind” to Michael Wolf’s look at the density of modern Asian cities. Join us as we stroll our own city in search of the “beach beneath the pavement.”