Photography 4.0: A Teaching Guide for the 21st Century

Educators Share Thoughts and Assignments

Michelle Bogre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317693840
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Photography

An invaluable resource for photography educators, this volume is a survey of photographic education in the first decade of the 21 st Century. Drawing upon her 25 years of teaching experience and her professional network, Michelle Bogre spoke with 47 photo educators from all over the world to compile this diverse set of interviews. The themes of these conversations explore:

• Why students should study photography

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• The value of a formal photography degree

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• Teaching philosophies

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• Whether video and multimedia should be an essential part of a photographic curricula

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• The challenges of teaching photography today

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• Changes in photographic education overall

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The second half of the book shares 70 photography assignments of varying level of difficulty from these educators, some paired with examples of how students completed them.

This book will inspire and invigorate any photography educator's curriculum.

1 PHOTOGRAPHY CONFIDENTIAL: EDUCATORS SPEAK

DOI: 10.4324/9781315777566-2

Michelle Bogre

THESE INTERVIEWS were conducted in late 2012 and the first half of 2013, either in person, via Skype, telephone, or email. The full conversations were all much longer than what appears in this chapter. I edited and condensed the transcripts but strived to maintain my colleagues’ voices by presenting their ideas as thoughts about general topics. A few conversations appear in a traditional question and answer format because that format seemed most appropriate. Yet, as with a photograph, I bear sole responsibility for what was excluded and what was included. These interviews do not and cannot represent all the ideas these photographers, artists, and educators have developed from a lifetime of teaching photography and making photographs. They should not be read as formal academic essays. They are conversations about photography and teaching photography and they should be read in that spirit.

Image courtesy of Chao Fang

Sama Alshaibi

Assistant Professor of Photography/Video Art

University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, United States

http://samaalshaibi.com

It is a difficult process being an artist. It is a very hard world. If you can‘t get yourself up in the morning to make work that matters, why are you in this field?

ON TEACHING PHOTOGRAPHY

I believe that art and photography can be taught. One of the problems I face here in America—I teach workshops in the Middle East—is that the average student has a lot of technical ability but also some bad habits. Students here have grown up taking pictures and looking at pictures but they don’t necessarily know how to make pictures. That might be more obvious here at the University of Arizona, where we are neighbors to the Center for Creative Photography (CCP). We have the archives of all the masters, and students come here with a romantic idea of wanting to do large-format black and white landscape images, but that is not just what I want students to be thinking about. I have to push them to think about what else photography can be. I don’t like to teach just the Western canon because they have too many professors who teach that, so I try to promote a transnational idea of looking at photography and how it can be used to advance sociopolitical issues.

I demand that my students work hard. I have high expectations of them and of myself. You come to my class, you have to work hard, but I am always available. I would never just write a little line with a grade; I provide substantive feedback. I try to reach all students with whatever works: humor; field trips; collaboration; talking about issues of gender, race, or sexuality, as long as the discussion is productive and respectful.

I also always assign a collaborative project, usually towards the end of the semester. I don’t let students pair up themselves. We draw names, because especially for undergrad students, they have to learn to work with people they may not know well. This replicates the model they will find themselves in when they work in the professional fields. I find that teams of three work better than teams of two. We choose a theme for the assignment. It works really well when it has something to do with magical realism or staging constructed realities because of the amount of work involved, and the diversity of production that draws on their different strengths. I show them a number of collaborative artists, such as Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, and explain how those collaborations work. The students benefit because they learn to lower their egos and think about the end result.

Students here have grown up taking pictures and looking at pictures but they don’t necessarily know how to make pictures.

ON PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLABORATION

I have collaborated a number of times, plus I was in a woman’s art collective for five years called 6+.¹ As an artist you can work alone, you can hire people to work for you, or you can work in collaboration. School is a good opportunity to model these types of creative practice, particularly the collaboration model. I attended both Columbia College in Chicago and the University of Boulder in Colorado. Even though I had a great education in both schools, it was really interesting to participate in the culture of the competitive art school. It was more cut-throat, focusing on the class “art star” as if to emulate the art world. I don’t believe in creating that environment in my classes because it values the “star” student too much. There will always be the supermega art stars but there also will be artists who won’t necessarily be on the map of fame, but they will have a practice that’s meaningful to them or to their community.

I’m not trying to deflate the idea of competition, but I don’t feel competition needs to be something external. It can be internal; you compete only against yourself. That’s why I like collaboration. As I explain to my students, collaboration isn’t useful if someone else is picking up the slack for you, or because there are more people doing it and there’s less work for you to do. Collaboration works because when you are working with someone else, you have to put your best foot forward because you all are responsible for the grade and the successful completion of a meaningful project. Collaboration builds community, and as artists we need each other.

ON TEACHING VIDEO

I love teaching video because students don’t come in with a preconceived idea of what being a video artist means. (We have a very strong high school photography program here in Tucson, so students come with a lot of rules about what photography is and isn’t.) Video is a bit of an enigma for them so it’s a fresh slate. Video is a difficult medium because it embodies so many types of media: time, image, sound, editing, lighting, and performance. But because they don’t come with preconceived ideas, I don’t have as much resistance and they trust me to teach them more holistically.

ON TEACHING ANALOG PROCESSES

Teaching technique is important because it is a position of authorship and authority within your own work. We teach all processes and all camera formats in my program. We believe that being able to control photographic materials is part of the formal delivery message. I see the difference that technical skills make because I am submerged in the art scene in the Middle East and North Africa, where some incredible artists have amazing, interesting, and sometimes subversive things to say, but they don’t always have the technical education or facilities to work in. So the work suffers from poor execution and that can hurt the artist because she or he won’t be taken seriously. I use this as examples for my students all the time so they can see how the work would have more impact if it had better technique or the artist thought more about certain kinds of formal issues.

ON CHALLENGES FOR PHOTOGRAPHIC EDUCATION

Some of my perceptions might be unique as an educator because we’re surrounded by Native American reservations in Arizona and we have many Native American students in our classrooms. They’re struggling with a different set of issues than most other students because they are passing back and forth between two different communities of lifestyles. One of the challenges is to teach why art matters when students are facing basic problems of poverty and social structures that don’t fit in the master narrative of the American Dream. Students who come from underserved communities sometimes have more to say in their work; their lives are a struggle and that struggle can find its place in art without having to reach too far. I’m not saying that students who live privileged lives don’t have anything to say, but it does take a lot more work to unravel the kind of boutique issues that they first want to talk about, the surface identity issues, friends, family, or struggling with college life. My challenge is to get them to engage in the world around them more critically, and focus less on the work being an exercise of self-therapy. It often takes a lot more work for those who come from communities of privilege, who didn’t grow up contending with survival and their place in society; whereas you get a student living on a reservation and they tend to have lived their lives negotiating survival, which often leads to very powerful work. Ultimately, all my students are capable of making powerful work; they all have unique challenges realizing them. Also, it is important to allow each student to express what she wishes in her work. I don’t assume a student that comes from dire experiences wants to talk about that in her work. We work together to materialize what she wants to say in a powerful format.

I have a friend, Meir Gal, who teaches in New York City. He tells his students not to go to galleries or museums for ideas. He wants them reading newspapers, listening to Pacifica,² thinking about struggles that are unfolding around them. I don’t agree with him 100 percent, but I’m pretty close to where he’s coming from. I want students to engage in the world around them. My students will say to me, “I am not like you. I’m not an Iraqi Palestinian who grew up in war and conflict.” My response to them is that there are so many issues in the U.S., but they are letting those issues pass them by; many are approaching the issues of their times as if they don’t concern them. They are disengaged and I don’t have much tolerance for that. It is a difficult process being an artist. It is a very hard world. If you can’t get yourself up in the morning to make work that matters, why are you in this field?

ON A FAVORITE CLASS

I designed a class entitled Discovering Place, taught online in our pre session of summer school. I wanted to do something that would be integral to who I am as an artist; I travel a lot because most of my work is based in the Middle East and North Africa. The class deals with bodywork in “place,” and how to use one’s own body to tap into a new space, community, landscape, or location. It addresses how you can quickly penetrate a community or a location through a different kind of tool, your body, which includes all of your senses. Since it’s online, most of the students are traveling when they take the class, so twice a week the students receive prompts, which are basically walking exercises. One exercise requires the students to map one of their senses, and only pay attention to that sense. Others are more directed, such as following desire lines in the land or in a social sphere, not a pre-made line like a sidewalk. One direction involves going through a space twice, once with the cocoon of an iPod, and once without, and be cognizant of how the experience changes. For instance, without blocking out the ambient sound that exists in space, we tend to be more present; we look at the people around us. The students realize that their own experience shifts based on what decisions they are making (cocooned or present) and how that develops their understanding of place.

I like it when students walk where they’re not supposed to be walking, trying to discover the social aspects of a space. They make images, but they can use any tool: cell phones, cameras, a scanner, or just journal writing. The end result is not about making work, but about discovering a place, revealing what’s underneath the surface. With mass media permeating around us, and in a generation where cameras are prolific (on our cell phones, laptops, etc.), we cease to really “see” anymore. This allows experiencing on new terms, which hopefully shifts the way they “see” and more importantly, experience the world around them.

Some of my students took this class two or three times because they felt it helped them in their photo classes afterwards, because the exercises shifted their focus from not just looking and composing a shot but to understanding the layers underneath an image and their own connection to it.

SAMA ALSHAIBI is a multimedia artist working in various media, including photography, video, video/object hybrids, multimedia installations, and sculpture. In her work, Alshaibi, who is Iraqi and Palestinian, focuses on spaces of conflict: the aftermath of war and exile, the power dynamics between the nation and its citizenry, and the interaction between humans competing for resources and power. Issues of war, occupation, and exile often share the stage with a female protagonist. Her work has been exhibited and/or screened nationally and internationally, in venues in Dubai, London, Venice, Paris, Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, Kosovo, and the U.S, among others. She holds a BA in Photography from Columbia College, Chicago, and a MFA in Photography, Video, and New Media from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

David Bate

Professor, Photography

University of Westminster, London, United Kingdom

www.davidbate.net

It is shocking that visual criticism including photographic studies is not taught in schools alongside an analysis of language, cinema, television, and the Internet as key forms that mediate the modern world—but those are not always taught either.

ON WHY STUDY PHOTOGRAPHY

There must be a hundred and one personal reasons that people study photography, most of them to do with curiosity, in one form or another. In the public realm, universities have taught courses since antiquity on the things relevant to their societies: the art of rhetoric, cooking, cosmetics, geometry, music, etc. Photography has joined the list as one of these things today, and rightly so. Education is for the acquisition and use of knowledge—the best photography programs do this too, teaching students to understand how to ask their own questions through making photographs and essays. Photography has a global presence even if it is not a universal language, as global advertising campaigns already found out to their detriment. A positive message in one part of the world may not be positive in another. For this reason alone, photography should be taught to everyone. It is shocking that visual criticism including photographic studies is not taught in schools alongside an analysis of language, cinema, television, and the Internet as key forms that mediate the modern world—but those are not always taught either. These media forms have increasingly come to mediate the university itself; so to not understand what makes them work is a new form of illiteracy.

ON PHOTOGRAPHIC EDUCATION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Since anyone can take photographs now with no technical knowl...