Teaching Photography

WARNING: RANT IN PROGRESS

Last night there was a post on one of the Internet forums that I visit. The OP was a woman whose daughter had been appointed photo editor of her middle schools school annual. The daughter apparently (and I believe this was due to the photographer mother’s influence) wanted to know how to teach the staff photographers how to take better photos for the annual.

There were a number of responses with suggestions on what to teach, how to teach, Internet sites they should visit to learn. Well, I have been in an negative mood for sometime now and when I am in a negative mood I generally speak my mind so I wrote a response.

“Yelp, I’m a naysayer. One of the things that I regret most in this life is that I had adults that taught me how to color inside the lines. I have spent most of my seventy years trying to undo that. Middle schoolers, bottom schoolers or top schoolers need adults to just butt out or their creative self-expression. It is more important for them to be individuals and to find their vision than it is to be told how to do it. They know what to do with cameras, have fun. It doesn’t matter if they are in focus or not. It doesn’t matter if they are well composed or not. Looking back through my school annuals the photographs that are the most enjoyable are the ones that are the worst because they say more about what it was like to be there at that time of life. Middles schoolers have plenty of life ahead of them to get formulated and rule bound so they sure don’t need adults screwing with their creativity.

And yes, I used to teach photography at the boys clubs in a politically incorrect time when you could have such things. I gave them Polarioid Type20 cameras and told them to go push the button and bring back the results. We had a great time.”

I hadn’t thought about the classes at the Boy’s Club in Wichita Falls in years so I tried to go back and try to remember what we did do. The thing I remember most distinctly was that I intentionally did not discuss any “rules.” I wanted them to explore their world visually on their own. I decided to try to verbalize my thinking on the subject of teaching photography to kids. What I came up with, of course, has been tainted with the forty years since but as best I can recall the following sums up my feeling then and now.

If I didn't teach the mechanics and the rules of photography, what did I teach? I chose the Polaroid Type 20 for the specific reason that it had no controls, just a viewfinder and a shutter release and for its time it had immediate feedback. That way I could attempt to teach what is really important about photography—the uniqueness of an individual’s vision.

What I tried to teach was that each individual is a unique being; that no two people will ever experience life or see the world exactly alike. Your vision, what your see, is unique and specific to only you, the space in which you exist and the time in which you live. What you experience during your life is specific to only you. It has never happened in the past and it will never be repeated in the future.

I tried to teach them that slicing those life experiences up into fractions of seconds and sharing what they found interesting/exciting/important/funny/sad, as an individual, was a worthwhile endeavor. Give people the opportunity to express themselves, to create based on their uniqueness and they will do marvelous things. Teach them to color inside the lines and they are foder for the rules bound camera club or Internet forum.

Most of us cannot go back and undo what has been done but thank God every once in awhile one sneaks through without having their vision corrupted. They go on to do great things leaving the rest of us to keep repeating ourselves, ourselves, ourselves, ourselves like broken records.

The boys would bring their photos back and we would discuss what we saw in their photographs. We would discuss why they found the subject photographed interesting or exciting. We would laugh with them at what they laughed at. We would try to understand where in their lives the photographs were coming from and then try to reinforce their interest in continuing to explore whatever it was as a part of their life as well as a part of their photography. There were no rules to be followed, no rules to break. All they needed to know was how to look through the viewfinder and what button to push to get the image on the Polaroid. If they continued with photography they would figure out the rest on their own. I would give the world if I could go back to that point in life and pursue photography again from that point of view.

Maybe I need to confiscate all the DSLRs, including my own, on the Discussion Blog and replace them with Polaroid Type 20s.