Dennis Dunleavy

Presidential candidate buttons

A box of campaign buttons of former presidential candidate are put on sale at
a Minneapolis gift shop.

Teaching photojournalism may not be obsolete, but it is changing

Last October, I wrote a post about how technology is changing the way in which we teach photography, especially as it relates to photojournalism.

Since then, readers have responded with great insight on the subject. Most recently, however, one respondent's comment prompts me to think hard about this issue.  Milwjill writes:

We need to develop a better pedagogy around teaching digital imaging. The educational strategies we used for years in the wet darkroom don't necessarily apply to the digital darkroom. Is anyone finding any good research on this? I don't want more "How to teach layers." I want more on learning styles, making connections between theory and practice, teaching technological flexibility and intuition, and so on. I look forward to any suggestions.

At the college I teach at we have given this issue a lot of thought. What we have had to struggle with, unfortunately, are not only pedagogical issues, but ideological concerns as well.

Education is deeply entrenched in the process of institutionalizing specialized conditions of knowledge. Sometimes, the institutionalization of teaching in traditional ways does not adequately address or keep pace with the ways in which students learn.

Historically, different disciplines have staked out and taken claim to teaching different skills sets to the point where even if there are overlaps between disciplines students find it difficult and frustrating to enroll in courses that do little more than teach from tutorials. 

In the realm of teaching digital media, the disciplines of art, video production, journalism, communication, and computer science are converging.  Although convergent is hard to deny many departments continue to compete for student enrollment by offering courses that offer the same foundational skill sets.  Little consideration, then, is given to not only to how students learn in a digital age, but also how to teach across converging disciplines.

At many colleges, the vocational mindset of teaching is the rule. This mindset is one that teaches skills without considering learning styles or theoretical perspectives. The vocational approach fails to consider the larger implications of  creating and consuming digital images in what appears to be a never-ending flood of digital images.

In my opinion, this mentality subjugates a capacity for optimizing learning experiences. What students are taught this year about a specific technology will probably be obsolete before they actually finish their education. Educators must consider how to teach in a world in which technology impinges on ways in which students apply knowledge in society.

What is needed are ways in which faculty across difference disciplines can collaborate with each other to find new models of teaching and learning. Dialog across the fields of computer science, digital arts, communication, video and journalism must take place before any substantive change can occur.

An interdisciplinary approach to teaching in the digital age, especially at the lower division level, can successfully provide students with a greater range of perspectives  and skill sets. 

For the past year, for instance, I have been teaching  a course  with a colleague in Art called Digital Media Foundations I. The course is the first in a series of foundational classes aimed at increasing recruitment and retention at the school, as well as eliminating course redundancies across disciplines. In the DMF sequence, comprised mostly freshman and sophomore students, instructors from art, journalism, video production and computer science team-teach various approaches to working with digital design, photography, page layout, web design, and audio and video editing. With one 90-minute lecture and a 3 hour lab each week, students integrate theory with applied techniques.

Evaluating and Measuring how students learn is based on several  pedagogical objectives. First to consider is the quality of the assignments presented to students. Each assignment is tied to larger constructs discussed in lecture and through journaling.  Throughout the week, students keep a journal of their visual experiences by collecting media, notes and original photography and artwork.

For example, in teaching digital photography some of the non-technical competencies explored include developing observational skills as well as understanding subject-photographer interaction. In teaching design and layout skills, students investigate the relationship between form and function as it applies to collage and book design. 

To address Milwjill concerns the design of the courses is very much centered on "making connections between theory and practice, teaching technological flexibility and intuition." At the same, getting the institution to think along these lines requires a great deal of patience.  There is always the possibility of a breakdown in implementing such a practical approach toward understanding student needs. Because institutions tend to be hierarchical, there is alway the risk of one discipline or department trying to take advantage over others for all sorts of reasons. When serious pedagogical differences cannot be worked out, the interdisciplinary approach of integrating theory with the applied fails.

Ultimately, teaching digital imaging demands that we not only help students understand how to create "layers" in Photoshop, but  why we do it.  In other words, we are always looking for ways to create learning experiences that make sense in the real world. Sometimes, however, that can be easier said than done.

Why are these people looking at me?

For a long time, editors often shied away from images of the poor and marginalized people looking directly into the camera lens. Editors chided photographers for making “portraits of strangers,” when there was direct eye contact was made between the subject and the photographer. The rationale? Eye-to-eye images make viewers uncomfortable and are too personal for mass audiences.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s photographers were encouraged to make images that reflected objectivity by not being noticed.  Although this preference may no longer be the case, there is still the consideration that appearance reflects reality.

The idea that a photographer could be inconspicuousness, like a fly on the wall, lent itself to the notion that an impartial observer would have no real influence over the scene being portrayed. Over the past decades, a relentless stream news images showing starving children has assaulted Western consciousness, yet poverty, starvation and disease continue. The so-call developed world has seen countless pictures of starving babies staring into the lens of a camera, yet remain we estranged from reality.

Cultural theorist Guy Debord observes that the spectacle can be thought of as an objectified vision of the world – a vision where people become alienated from each other and the things they produce.  Albeit obtuse, Debord’s criticism of modernity is reflected, unintentionally, in the visual routines and practices of today’s media. Today’s media, often with the help of public relations experts, seek to simplify political, economic and moral complexity through sound bites and photo ops. Photographers make pictures with the expectation that audiences will come to perceive what is presented as something of a truth.

Debord notes:

The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.

There are rhetorical distinctions presented in various types of news photographs. There are subtle nuisances between looking at and being looked at. Looking into the eyes of stranger invites us read a personal narrative that may be alienating. The eyes, like a child staring into the camera in a “Save the Children” poster pleads with us to take action—to give money. In these images, there is far less ambiguity compared to pictures that have a subject looking away.

The eyes also suggest a relationship between the photographer and subject  – one that may lead viewers to interpret the image differently. More importantly, pictures suggesting the appearance of a pose do not activate the viewer’s attention in the same way as images of people in action. In this way, with the subject looking off camera, the viewer is not confronted with having to interact directly.  Anytime a subject, especially the poor and marginalized from the so-called Third World, appears in a U.S. publication, a sort of déjà vu occurs. We have become increasingly detached and anesthetized from much of the wider world because the pictures simply say, over and over again, “been there, done that.”

To test the idea that eye contact in a picture has a distinct rhetorical function compared to images that have no eye contact, I turn to my own work from the 1980s in Central America.

There are two images I will analyze here: one depicts a female rebel soldier sitting on a bench after a patrol, while the other shows an elderly woman staring into the lens of the camera. In the former, the woman is looking away from the camera.

I assume that one way of measuring a picture’s emotional and intellectual appeal is through various feelings of immediacy, intensity and intimacy.

Not all images can be characterized has having all three elements of appeal, and it appears that in this case both present immediately and with a degree of intensity, they fail to be equally intimate.

Although interpretations remain the unique province of each viewer, it appears that focal point, as well as eye contact contribute to levels of intimacy in the frame.  I am drawn to the withered face and blank stare of the woman looking into the lens more than the picture of the female combatant. Although curiously intrigued by the latter image, I find the former more intimate. In a sense, I could argue that the first image is more persuasive in that it holds my emotional attention longer than the second.