Without sounding too acerbic, there’s a recent article in PDN Online about photojournalism education that's a bit troubling. The article is about how a few well known photojournalists have come to split their time between teaching and working professionally.
However, before I launch into a rant, I want to make sure that my criticism is aimed at the writer's focus in this piece and not on the individuals interviewed for the story.
Jason Skog’s article “From Darkrooms to Classrooms” focuses on three photojournalists who are now teaching in higher education. The angle of Skog's piece reflect the myopic view that professionals-turned-teachers can help students either win awards or make money from photojournalism.
The problem with featuring this sort of educational option is that many students may get the wrong idea about understanding the brutal realities of the profession. By focusing on the glitz, Skog misses what education ought to be really about.
First and foremost, promoting the more glamorous and senstational aspects of the field such as covering natural disasters to win awards or make money does nothing to help students understand the fact that there are simply not enough jobs in photojournalism to support the increasing number of people coming out of these programs.
In fact, competition at even the most entry-level jobs has become intense. Skog, in playing up the celebrity status of these instructors, overlooks the importance of providing students with life-long critical thinking skills.
Is it unreasonable to think that the hiring of high profile professionals represents little more than some sort of marketing and recruitment scheme? Bringing in big names to teach is not exactly new, but we should take it for what it is – an effort to bolster, brand and bump-up the status of some photojournalism programs.
According to one instructor/professional, students were actually encouraged to hop in a car and drive down to New Orleans to make pictures during Hurricane Katrina. When even seasoned professionals are taking their lives into their hands, how responsible is it for instructors to send a bunch of over-zealous students into harm’s way? Encouraging students to cover natural disasters outside of their comfort zones is unethical and dangerous.
For me, this example signifies the “Bang Bang Club” mentality that for decades has fed our culture’s insatiable appetite for sensationalistic images and marked our profession as exploitative, invasive and insensitive. It’s the old “if it bleeds, it leads” argument one that evokes a disarming uneasiness in me.
I would hate to think that this is what the general public thinks we are teaching our students in college.
In the case of the Katrina coverage, some of the best photojournalists in the business, working for some of the best photo papers in the country, have complained about how they ran into students down on the Gulf Coast that were not only ill-prepared for what they witnessed, but even less prepared to survive in such conditions. Students, in some instances, became a liability for professionals trying to get a job done.
If a student gets lucky enough to make a picture worthy of the Pulitzer without getting himself/herself or someone else killed that should not be taken as a sign that anyone with a camera can make these sorts of pictures.
Our first obligation as educators is to teach critical thinking, not producing Pulitzer prizes. What if the student died while making pictures of Katrina? How would the instructor explain the death to the student’s parents? Would the institution ultimately be held responsible for the death?
I am bothered by the arrogance of anything suggesting that learning to make meaningful images is somehow connected to winning awards and going after the big events. There are many photojournalism programs across the country that have stayed away from the “star” faculty system, even though it could bolster the market value of the school. There are hundreds of teachers out there who engage students daily in a more rigorous academic approach to teaching photojournalism as an art as well as a science.
In the article, another instructor spoke about the students in terms of those who get it, those who almost get it, and those who will never get it. I would hate to think that any student I work with will have only a 30 percent chance of making a career out of what they learn from me. If we think of education in these terms we are doing both our students and ourselves something that seems disingenuous.
This may all sound petty to some, but a critical reading of this sort of article is important because it calls into question what our responsibilities in photojournalism education ought to be. What I do not get out of reading Skog's article is any sense that there probably is a lot more being taught at these schools than making money or winning prizes.
