INTRO TO PHOTOGRAPHY This intro photo class has an experimental, philosophical approach. This course has an experimental, philosophical approach that encourages students to devise their own definitions of the medium by asking questions about vision, light/shadow, reproduction, editing and presentation. Presentations, demos, and assignments teach a range of practical skills and conceptual approaches. Students leave with a comprehensive, critical understanding of photography that they can take in many directions. The following list describes the course projects and skills taught. During the class, these processes are accompanied by an examination of the ways that each device or action is part of larger cultural ideas and trends and by a presentation of relevant artists’ works. Students respond critically to these ideas and materials by putting them into practice in conjunction with other personal or conceptual influences PROJECTS Redefining The Photographic (make a photo without a camera, printer or paper) Reading Response Homemade Viewing Device (invent a viewing device) Critique Portable Camera Obscura Pinhole Photography Alice in Wonderland Sequence (sequence of images responding to narrative) Camera Scavenger Hunt (learn features of the 35mm analog or digital camera) Digital Editing Tools Shadow Play (experiment with light and shadow) Low Tech (reproductive processes on the edge of photography, printmaking and painting) Distributed Book (create a side-stitch book) Flip-Book SLIDESHOWS Camera & Light Vision Light & Shadow Series & Sequence Reproductive Processes PRACTICAL SKILLS LEARNED • Understanding of optics and the mechanics of different types of cameras • ability to construct and operate a camera obscura and pinhole camera • familiarity with their digital camera’s features, and ability to control image quality • ability to control sizing, resolution, color setting, color casts, tonal range, and contrast with digital editing software. • ability to make a digital contact sheet • ability to create a digital print • knowledge of black-and-white darkroom contact printing and processing • ability to set up and control lighting intensity, contrast and color • use of photocopier • knowledge of image transfer processes (wintergreen oil, acrylic and inkjet transfers) • ability to bind images using the side-stitch technique • understanding of photography and motion and the ability to create animations CONCEPTS LEARNED • greater understanding of the possibilities of “photography” • critical grasp of the nature of vision and how it is mediated by the eye/brain and by constructed devices • familiarity with a range of artists’ works involving photography • appreciation of the dynamics between translating a text to image • ability to consider narrative that is presented as part of a series or within a sequence • awareness of the psychological and cultural significance of light and shadow • understanding of the democratic, monetary, and aesthetic connotations of photographic reproduction • knowledge of several critique strategies and approaches PROJECT 1: REDEFINING THE PHOTOGRAPHIC Students make a “photograph” without using a camera, a digital printer or darkroom, or any kind of paper. This is an introductory project listed in the Reframing Photography Projects as “Photograph Without Paper / Printer / Darkroom / Camera”. I often give this project on the first day of class because it asks students to reconsider how "photography" can be defined. Rather than reducing photography to its physical form (a printed image), students begin to consider and identify conceptual characteristics of photography. I give very little introduction to this project so that they really need to find their own way. A great outcome of the assignment is the conversation that takes place when students present their work from this project. It's interesting to learn significant experiences everyone has had with photography, and what the medium has enabled or affected in their lives. When I begin with this project, students seem to become more philosophical and better equipped to make conceptual leaps in their work in future projects, whatever the technical parameters of those projects may be. Reframing Photography, Photographic Analogies, from the essay “Copying, Capturing, and Reproducing”, page 171. Author Susan Sontag agrees that photographic images possess the presence of the original subject. In her essay “The Image-World,” she notes that past societies saw an object and its image as having different physical characteristics, but a similar “energy or spirit”.(2) While paintings may provide an image that is merely an appearance of the thing painted, “a photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.”(3) Like a fossil, a photograph offers a trace of an object now resigned to the past. As physical imprints, fossils and photographs hold significant power; while we know they are not identical to their pre-fossilized selves, we understand that they are powerful replacements. As their referent disappears, the remnants become as important as the original. In doing so, they essentially become similar to the source itself. Since my grandparents’ deaths, the few photographs I have of them have become increasingly valuable, to the point where, where I see them, I almost feel as though I am visiting my grandma and pappy….. (2) Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1989), 155. originally published in 1977. (3) Susan Sontag, On Photography, 154. PROJECT 2: READING RESPONSE Students post responses to weekly readings. This project is listed under the title “Reading Responses” within the Reframing Photography Projects. The reading responses encourage students to process and analyze the ideas and information, and allow them to expand on these ideas. They are a helpful way for instructors to keep track of whether and how students are interpreting the readings and how they are making connections between these topics and their own artwork. PROJECT 3: HOMEMADE VIEWING DEVICE Make a viewing device that corrects/emphasizes your own habits as viewer. This project is listed under the same name within the Reframing Photography Projects. This project is helpful before we begin to work with cameras as it slows students down and asks them to consider their own vision. The project gives students control over how their vision is altered and how the world is seen. Hopefully, when we then start working with camera obscuras and digital and analog cameras, they’ll see these tools more critically. Reframing Photography, Visual Technologies, from the essay “Seeing, Perceiving and Mediating Vision”, page 27 Our inattention to the influences of tools such as the eye and brain, visual conventions such as perspective, and our constructed environment is somewhat understandable. More surprising, perhaps, are the ways we use visual technologies daily, yet rarely notice how these devices organize our world. We arrange friends within the camera’s viewfinder and consume TV narratives without actually regarding the technology that constructs the images. Just as we see without recognizing the process of seeing, we bypass the technology that mediates visual encounters and go straight to the picture. When the tools that produce the images are taken for granted, we become less aware of the photographic way of seeing. In The Reconfigured Eye, William J. Mitchell explains that while we may think we control the mechanics of photographic construction—cameras, lenses, and other paraphernalia—it is actually these devices that determine the way we “see the world”: “While we have been using the tools, operations, and media of photography to serve our pictorial ends, these instruments and techniques have simultaneously been constructing us as perceiving subjects.” (88) …. (88) William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992), 59. Reframing Photography, Learning to Assemble Vision, from the essay “Seeing, Perceiving and Mediating Vision”, page 13 The neurologist Oliver Sacks writes that “most of us have no sense of the immensity of this construction [our visual construction of the world], for we perform it seamlessly, unconsciously, thousands of times every day, at a glance.”(30) The complexity of this process becomes dauntingly apparent within Sacks’s account of Virgil, a blind man in his fifties who, following cataract surgery, regained the use of his eyes. When the bandages were removed, Virgil experienced a world of sensa for the first time since childhood. However, Virgil still depended upon his prior faculties as a blind man (sound, touch, taste, smell) to understand the sensa. For example, he recognized that a bright colored blur comprised a man only upon hearing the man’s voice. He could experience the phenomena of light and color, but could not process them into the appearances of objects. His need to relearn the world according to the codes of a sighted person illustrates that seeing is a learned experience, based on memory and accumulated encounters in a visual world. Like Virgil, a photographic camera cannot distinguish a person from a bicycle and does not know that one is alive and the other inanimate. The eye of the camera is directed by an operator who selects, remembers, and perceives….. (30) Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (New