Pete Brook talks with Kate Palmer Albers, Larry Cook, and Tamara Cedré about fear and the state of photography education in the age of memes and the disconnection between image and context.
Photo by Robert Gumpert
Pete Brook: I think I might hold some serious fears. Fears about the field of photo education.
I have a fear that photography and images don't relate to the real world anymore. I sense that the visual culture of politics, news, what's visible, our screen experience, is very shouty, repetitive, and untethered. I sense the beauty or the nuance or the opportunity that images give us to connect with the human condition is getting lost. Additionally, there’s a lot of unknowns during this time of enforced distance learning. I worry that we may not be able to learn visual literacy fast enough to stay ahead of misinformation or images that are “untrustworthy”; I worry that Trumpism (which will continue for years regardless of who is in the White House) has only exacerbated weaknesses in our fragile, negotiated relationship to images. And I worry that these things might not be as temporary as I would prefer them to be.
Is my fear warranted?
Tamara Cedre: The generation we are teaching speak in images. You had the Vice Presidential debate, and what were the images that were circulating the very next day? A fly on the head of Mike Pence and his pink eye. We're speaking in memes to each other — this traffic of images. You've got sensational images that accumulate immediately during and after these events, and then you've got, frankly, very romantic images in the press.
In photojournalism, we’re seeing more of a tendency towards a kind of formalism again, a kind of romanticism, this artistic latitude in documentary photography that was not necessarily present in earlier photojournalism. It's very bizarre and surreal to have these events like the president getting Coronavirus and then seeing these very romantic images in news stories when newspapers are considered vehicles of objective representation to convey stories. And then on the other side of it, you're seeing viral memes and selfies.
The Vice Presidential debate’s most trafficked image.
PB: Have you incorporated social media platforms into your teaching? I have a colleague who sets up a new Instagram account each year for one of their classes. Have any of you thought about using Tik Tok or Instagram in your teaching?
TC: I did for this last summer's classes. I usually teach analog photography and a beginning digital course. We were told that students would not have access to any equipment. I teach in a lower-income area where students do not necessarily have cameras. They've got them on their phones only. Maybe one out of ten students could afford a DSLR, so I didn't think it was fair to require them to shoot. So I had them using found images. I had them using Tik Tok. I had them using Instagram, I had them using anything lens-based, by any means necessary. And I gave these very open prompts like a self-portraiture prompt. If they wanted to use found images, if they wanted to do a narrative through Instagram or Tumblr, they could, and it was a very different way of teaching. It wasn’t the way I've done it for the last eight years which is a very formalist way of teaching the photographic image. But I think it was valid, and I am bringing in readings like Kate's book Uncertain Histories: Accumulation, Inaccessibility, and Doubt in Contemporary Photography and Allan Sekula’s The Traffic In Photographs. I'm having them think about images in a very viral, democratic way that might be a departure from the decisive moment and the way that we were taught to make photographs in art school.
Kate Palmer Albers: To me, so much of this has to do with attention, right? You can bring critical attention to any image. It can be a meme. It can be a photo documentary work. It can be an artwork. My classes aren't production classes. They're classes in visual culture and history, and the way that I bring in social media is not through having a dedicated Instagram or Twitter page for the class, but, rather, asking the students to be critically aware of how social media functions and how images circulate and of what the text/image relationships are in a meme or in an Instagram feed or in a fine art photograph.
This is very much an attention economy, and that's something to be fearful of for the reasons that you've said, Pete. It threatens to be so dominant in terms of how we consume and what our attention is directed toward. Certainly, as educators, that's always a place to intervene, always a place to interrupt— that constant onslaught of information— by doing what Larry mentioned: slowing down, backing up. Let’s try to understand what this fly [on Mike Pence's head] is all about, let's analyze how these images are circulating and how people are responding to them, and what the speed of those images is in relationship to the speed of other kinds of images.
PB: Larry, do you teach studio photography? And what else goes on at Howard? How would you teach now? You're building that program up at the moment, right?
LC: We just put together a curriculum for an MFA in photography, so I'm hoping that it gets approved by the graduate curriculum committee. In terms of what I teach my students, I focus a lot more on technical execution alongside being able to articulate your decision making. What are the problems that you're creating and how are you solving these problems? One of the reasons I take that approach is because, in my experience, teaching in these types of environments, there's so much emphasis on identity. It’s always concerning because I think when you have such a fixation on identity, it becomes a little bit limiting. You begin to rely a lot on things that are in the abstract, in a way that I don't think, especially for beginning photographers, is as healthy. So I’m just really trying to build a strong foundation. There are so many things, as we all know, that come along with that— a certain type of discipline and attention to detail and cultivating a certain type of love and passion for the craft. So I tend to start from that particular point and place a lot of emphasis on those qualities.
In the art department, just in terms of education, the social climate often creeps into every aspect of it. It's hard to be able to teach and navigate certain images, where a lot of people want the conversation and content to remain in a particular space. A lot of it, as I mentioned, is either political or identity politics and I think a lot of it has to do with what's happening in the larger society and certain expectations and how we see ourselves. It can be difficult to— not completely break away from that— but to try to provide a good balance.
U.S. Naval ships in Target Bay, Culebra by Harry Richards, 1914
An abandoned naval bunker in Vieques, 2015
KPA: Tamara brought up earlier that these aren't new conversations. Some of them are, but a lot of them have really important historical connections, and the degree to which we can encourage students to be thinking about some previous conversations, I find that long view very encouraging. There is a history of struggle and a history of people feeling overwhelmed by images and by media and by representation or lack of representation. I don't think it would be better to be [thinking about this] 50 years ago, you know? It’s heartening to take a much longer view.
TC: As I read something like The Traffic In Photographs, which I keep going back to, there's something about– I think images need other images. Images need context. Images need words. This idea of the singular, absorbing image, the high craft, the formalism– I can't look at photography that way anymore. It's not my world. It's not my kids’ world. It's not what they're looking at. I always ask my students, “Who are you in conversation with?" That's not how I was taught in art school. It was, what's your unique and individual voice in the world? Find your authorship. And I always tell them, “Well, that's bullshit. You are in conversation with the music you listen to, the films you watch, where you come from. Your vernacular is not in a bubble. Everything is in context with something outside of yourself. Right?" And that's how I'm looking at photography, too. It’s getting weird. It's exploding. It doesn't stop. It's still revealing.
LC: If you feel that there is an imbalance then, again, as instructors, we have a certain amount of agency in providing that counter-narrative or balance to those particular topics or issues. I think that in terms of outlook, it's just an opportunity to engage it from a different perspective. In terms of what I would like to see more of, it’s really just more diversity of thought and perspectives in the way that people engage with these kinds of topics and materials. And again, it challenges me to go beyond just the scope of what I was taught and the artists and critics that I had to rely upon and to be diverse in terms of my research and preparing my courses and even the materials and the examples of photographers and references. It just puts a little bit more of the onus on me as an instructor.
PB: I feel like you're just well-positioned to do that because you make work, and then you’re an educator also, and your work is quite subtle.
How have you changed your curriculum in 2020? There have been a lot of calls for decolonizing curricula, so I've made changes to what I teach, and I'm interested to know if you felt pressure or exhilaration or worried?
LC: Can you provide an example of changes you have made, Pete?
PB: I’ve added a couple of assignments that ask students to connect with 19th-century images through their own stories and storytelling.
Instead of mentioning the Zealy Daguerreotypes in a lecture, which I have done in the past, I spent two classes on them. It has helped that Aperture has just produced a book and they're doing public talks. I am following the scholarship and locating those Zealy Daguerreotypes as almost a visual Ground Zero, the starting point, if we're going to talk about the relationships between slavery and photography and power. Maybe that's the first place we go before we explore the other photographs from the 1840s that precede these daguerreotypes. The Zealy Daguerreotypes, made in 1850, in terms of what they were doing– photographing people without their consent, as property, and as evidence for bogus racist science– they anchor us in our history of racial violence.
From the series Urban Landscapes by Larry Cook
Larry Cook
TC: Ariella Azoulay’s new book locates the origins of photography. There, embedded into the medium of photography, is colonization. In the age of Western Expansion– as large parts of the world are being colonized– is the birth of the camera. That's how I have started my photo history classes for years.
KPA: Yes, I think there's a lot with framing, certainly. I'm teaching History of Photography right now. For this class starting in early September, it was like, Well, I can't possibly just start with the invention of photography. Not with this state of the nation, this state of the world. I always make a big deal in my classes about the way that images impact narrative, and the role of images to either expose or conceal, and the connection between text and image in media and in art, all these much bigger framing issues. But for this class, our whole first unit was protest and pandemic. That was the dual theme.
I introduced the whole shape of the class and all of that material about narrative and the role of images in relationship to narrative, both now and historically. For instance, from the Aperture issue that Sarah Lewis edited, we read her conversation with Bryan Stevenson, Truth and Reconciliation, about the role of images to shape narratives of racial violence over history and to foreground different national narratives as well as different individual narratives. This expanded into a framing device for the entire class.
LC: My curriculum hasn't shifted too much. I require a lot more writing, in terms of formal visual analysis, looking at photography, writing about photography. I think one of the reasons is just trying to be mindful of people’s circumstances and resources that are available, not being able to be on campus. The critique is very different being online. So, written critiques, peer-written critiques, those kinds of things. It is more a response to the limitations of being virtual during the pandemic.
Renty, a slave photographed by J.T. Zealy
TC: The thing that I've been changing— I've always been decolonizing the curriculum because I come from a colony. And I also come from a lot of Black, radical scholarship in Baltimore that I’m grateful for. I have always looked at photography as this colonial medium, but what I recently have been doing is integrating more queer work, LGBTQIA work, which was absent from my education in graduate school and undergraduate school, and trying to bring visibility to some movements that I didn't necessarily know about. Jess Dugan, Rafael Soldi and some other folks— the Strange Fire collective— has some really wonderful resources that have helped me to integrate that into the curriculum. So that was kind of cool. They're doing some fantastic stuff.
I also have students doing online journals through Tumblr and Instagram, and I have them meditating every week. If we've got 13 weeks, they will have 13 entries on the material, and they can produce anything from a YouTube video to whatever they want. They’re always processing. There's a process journal that goes with everything from studio photography to photo history. That's kind of nice, because it gives them a kind of introspection, and it allows them to use social media towards something that's a little more thoughtful.
PB: I think Trump has done quite a lot of damage to photography.
He and his administration undermine the media. They formalized this phrase "fake news,” and they groomed us every day on a diet of seditious, democracy-busting lies. All the while, technologies, deep fakes, facial recognition, AI, are taking image-reading out of many images. Even loose captions or deliberately misleading comments send folks into partisan tailspins. Question one: Do you think that Trump Republicans and the larger political environment has damaged previously healthy, or healthier, relationships to photography? Question two: Does that have any long term consequences or effects on education and photo education? Personally, I think the answers to those two questions are related, but I don't think they're the same.
Kate Palmer Albers’ student Clara Velazquez breaks down an image by Martine Gutierrez.
Velazquez completes a writing exercise about the same Martine Gutierrez image.
KPA: I'm not sure I would agree with the premise that trust is necessarily bound up with a healthy relationship to images. So there's certainly an opportunity to connect historically theatrical modes of image production with what we're seeing today and draw a historical continuum. The alarm that we should have about things like deep fake videos and the potential for those to do a lot of damage is real, but I'm not sure I would hang it on just the last four years. This is all part of a much broader context.
