My primary purposes as an instructor are: 1. to teach students the technical elements and tools of the craft, 2. to encourage students’ intellectual growth and visual literacy through discussion, critique, reading, and writing, and 3. to assist students in realizing their artistic visions.
I think of teaching as creative collaboration; to achieve this end, I try to infuse every assignment, even intro-level technical classes, with some space for creative expression. Open-ended projects such as Believable Fiction, Text + Image, and the in-class picture press book give students room to exercise their creativity, while simultaneously learning technical and aesthetic problem-solving skills and visual literacy. Since so much of visual art training is not in making, but in seeing, many of my exercises and pedagogical practices are geared toward enhancing students’ visual literacy and awareness. Each project begins with a brief slide lecture to expose students to the greater visual culture.
To achieve these goals, I try to combine technical training, conceptual exploration, and creative freedom in all but the most basic assignments, such as the following:
The Believable Fiction project provides the student with an opportunity to create his or her own “post-photographic” digital image fakery. The student is asked to create a digital montage of at least four photographs that can pass for a “straight” photograph. An archive of digital images is provided for them to choose from, however one image must be scanned in by the student, either from film or a print. The goals are threefold; to teach students the basic tools of Photoshop, to increase students’ visual literacy and ability to interpret photographs, and to give them an outlet for creative expression.
In the Text + Image project, a different approach is employed. This project starts with a brief in-class writing exercise to generate short lines based on memories. The students then generate one photograph based on their writing—not merely illustrating their writing, but trying to capture its mood, feeling, or atmosphere. After a demonstration of text tools and effects in Photoshop, the text and image are then combined to form a hybrid of visual and verbal languages.
The in-class picture press book, unlike the previous exercises, is geared more toward visual literacy. Students are given a stack of color images taken from the “picture press”—magazines like Time, Newsweek, People, US, Entertainment Weekly, etc. They are then split into groups and given brown craft paper, Scotch tape, and scissors to make a photographic book in class. Students are cautioned to keep text to a minimum, letting the meaning of the book be shaped primarily by its images. In this way students learn the power of the photographic sequence, the juxtaposition of images, and the use of iconic images such as celebrity photographs.