This seminar will investigate the enormous significance of photography in post WW II art and culture. A single example of photography's force in shaping both the form and critical discourse of art is evident in conceptual art and its legacy. Roland Barthes, whose essays on photography, advertising, and the "real" are seminal, is among those critics whose works we will study in-depth. In the course of the seminar, we will also analyze how artists, including Diane Arbus, Richard Prince, Carrie Mae Weems, Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman and others, as well as selected graphic designers and video artists, have deployed photography either to produce the real (the "reality effect") or to dismantle it.