In 2020, American artist Amy Sillman curated an exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City that drew from their vast collection. That exhibition didn’t actually happen due to COVID, but a virtual catalog was made for the show which, Instead of a central concept, looked at different artworks and how they dealt with shape. Sillman wrote that “basically everything in the world is a shape. It’s so mundane and so ubiquitous: every edge, corner, blob, form, silhouette, or negative space is something you have to navigate to get through a room. If you think of shape as figure/ground, then every shape is a figure and the ground is the whole world.”

We’ll focus on how different photographers — Lee Friedlander, Jan Groover, Thomas Ruff, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and others — use and work with shape. We’ll also examine shapes under different aspects like “the shadow,” “machines for seeing,” “eccentric abstraction,” and more, drawing from theoretical concepts like Gestalt Theory and Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color. Weekly photography exercises, accompanied by detailed analysis of your pictures, will help you see these principles at work. For those familiar with Stefan’s Gestalt class, this course will be a slightly looser and more playful way to explore different aspects of how shapes shape photography.