Admission & Eligibility

Spring 2026 

Director: Robert Knight, Professor of Art
Phone: 315-859-4266
Email: rbknight@hamilton.edu
Open to all majors.

Concentration credit will be accepted for Studio Art (College 395 and 398); Art History (College 395 and 398); Cinema and Media Studies (College 395) and Digital Arts minor (College 395).

No prerequisite, but preference is given for students who have taken a Studio Art or Art History course.
 

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New York City has long been at the epicenter in the development of photography as a fine art. The first galleries devoted to the medium were founded there in the late 1890s by the legendary modernist photographer Alfred Stieglitz. In the 1940s, The Museum of Modern Art launched the first photography department at a prominent museum, with New York-based photographer Edward Steichen as its founding curator. Alongside such institutional support, New York nurtured a burgeoning art scene with photographers’ studios and darkrooms occupying former industrial and warehouse spaces across the city. This program will focus on the intersection of those two histories, focusing specifically on the development of “street” photography as a genre and the institutions that helped catapult photography onto the center of the art world stage.

College 395: Documentary Photography in the Digital Age

This is a photography production course in which we will use smartphone and DSLR cameras to explore the fabric of the city as a site for photographic investigation, closely examining its rich cultural, racial, and socioeconomic diversity. Each week, we will use the history of New York-based “street” photography as a road map for site-specific photographic field trips. Since the early 1900s, the streets of New York have served as an inspiration to generations of photographers such as Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Roy DeCarava, Margaret Bourke-White, and Helen Levitt, among many others. Class will be a combination of classroom-based technical training, critique, and in situ production. Potential photographic sites include Times Square, Central Park Zoo, Chinatown, South Street Seaport, Washington Square Park, Prospect Park, Coney Island, and Governor’s Island.

College 398: Arts Leadership in NYC

This seminar will provide students with a macro perspective on the role of the arts in various industries. While we will often focus specifically on photography, we will also consider other arts, such as theater, music, design, and dance. New York has long-served as the institutional capital of the art world. This seminar will take advantage of New York’s status through visits and meetings with arts leaders at various NYC-based institutions, including The Whitney Museum, the International Center for Photography, The Studio Museum Harlem, Christie’s, Phillips, Pace/MacGill Gallery, The New York Philharmonic, The Wooster Group, The New York Public Library, The Armory Show, among others. Field trips will be supplemented with classroom lectures, readings, and discussions.

College 397: Internship

Work experience with an artist, business, organization, agency, or advocacy group appropriate to the theme of the course during four days a week.  Weekly electronic journal entries chronicling and reflecting upon the experience required.

College 396: Independent Study

Supervised tutorial resulting in a substantial photographic project and/or written paper that integrates experience and learning from the internship with an academic perspective and knowledge gained in the seminars or other tutorial readings.