Reflections on teaching (undergraduate) photography for the first time:
First, some recurring themes:
Subject: What the photograph is ‘of’ in the physical world.
Form: Method of description used, physical materials, and manipulation by the artist
Content: Conversations and ideas made present by the interaction of the subject and the formal strategies.
Pointing your camera at something does not make a photograph, though it can.
Intensive looking leads to successful seeing.
What do you want to look at with your camera?
What you want to look at is not what you want to think about.
Your intellectual life feeds your artwork. But intellectualism without formal commitment and investigation does not make good art.
Successful photographs raise philosophical questions through formal decisions and strategies.
Directions not directives.
Personal investment. Technical Investment. Time Investment.
Pictures that reward sustained looking are the most successful kind.
During critique, at first limit your verbal response to describing and interrogating the formal qualities of the work.
Your content relates to your subject matter through form.
Your idiosyncrasies are the only thing you truly have, and the only thing that will ever save you.
What are the conditions under which you are most productive?
How do you solve a problem?
Formal strategies of investigation lead to production of content.
Subject matter is not Content.
Know what decisions you made and own your decisions.
Play is exploration that is necessary for making, and setting up the parameters for play should be a part of any undertaking.
Technique is a matter of personal preference, but technique should have a considered logic.
Sustained investigation, Sustained looking, Sustained thinking.
Disagree with me. Talk back.
Pictures are not people. Pictures are not reality. Pictures are not performances. Pictures are Pictures.
Pictures can go on a wall, Pictures can go on screens, Pictures are everywhere. Where are pictures?
Photography describes surfaces.
What can a photograph do?
Where is the boundary of photography? How can you find and explore that space?
(in progress and being updated and edited as i think of things)
i've been thinking a lot about critique and feel like i have some things that i have been thinking about that i can now after a semester of solo teaching point to. things that have lead to students making *good work* and fostering *good community* and how to promote both while not sacrificing rigor or people.
‘It’ has to do with the framework that you lay down for people on the first day and with setting the terms on the first critique. ‘it’ has to do with rewarding significant investment and not letting people make excuses for themselves. ‘it’ seems to work best that way because it requires you to do the work, if you don't do the work there's nothing to talk about.
Respect. I think, ‘it’ also has to do with fostering a community that is founded on respect.
I respect your interests, opinions, you, you respect the community, class, and the workload.
Increase of respect increases degree of investment.
Not dismissing students. Consistently checking myself on how I am privileging certain kinds of students or not privileging them.
Not correcting the language errors of international students without request.
Not expecting student’s trauma to be explained to me.
Not talking /about/ students in critique, only about the work.
My students are smarter than me. But, I have lived longer and have tried more things. When I uncentered myself and let myself off the hook of being the smartest person in the room, I stopped feeling like I was faking it. I stopped stressing out about being ‘wrong’. I was just another person looking for knowledge in a community of people doing the same thing.
“This teaching thing, you learn a lot.”
I resist my urge to be lazy in my looking. If I am being lazy, why should anyone else try?
Over the course of the semester with every critique, we slowly moved the marker on how much people talked about their own work. In the beginning, artist listens, class talks about the work, with a focus on formal strategies. We become familiar with the language of the medium. I don’t care what you like, I care about how this object makes you think. Next critique, artist provide context without explaining away the work. And so on for the remaining critiques. Final critique, artist is asked to make a five minute introduction of the work, it’s focus, formal strategies, problems, solutions. Artists are expected to own their decisions, and to know what decisions they made.
Paul Graham said “photography is easy, photography is hard.” The same is true for teaching. One half life coach, one half artist mentor.
Sustained personal investigation
Explore and nurture personal idiosyncrasies
Learn to try, relentlessly
