Monday, July 26, 2010

On Photographing Children and Meeting Students Halfway.

My colleague Almae Larson and I were sitting around the lunch table a few semesters ago when she mentioned that someday she would really like to put together a slide presentation of photographers who make images of children. It was frustrating to her that students gravitated toward images of babies in pea pods or tended to only photograph children who were doing cute, sweet things.

Feeling adventurous, I took her up on the challenge, and got on ArtStor and put a little something together, with the following artists:

August Sander
Wynn Bullock
Harry Callahan
Julia Margaret Cameron
Lewis Carroll
Emmet Gowin
Gertrude Kasebier
Lewis Hine
Jacques Lartigue
Sally Mann
Ralph Eugene Meatyard
W. Eugene Smith, and here
Anonymous 19th Century Daguerreotypes of Sleeping Babies.

If you know anything about the photographers on the list (or you take the time to look through the links), you will see that there is some challenging work in there.

The statistics that my university system gives us, as faculty, is that something like sixty percent of our students are working mothers who are trying to improve their job situation, and thus, are back at school. That number is not always born out in my classes, but on the day I showed the images to my class, I would bet more than a third of the students had children of their own.

Again, if you know the photographers on the list, you can probably imaging the top-of-my head narrative I was giving: “This guy photographed Germans and had to run from the Nazis, this girl is Alice from ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and the images weren’t so creepy in the 19th Century, this woman photographed her children and her books were banned as obscene, this guy was a well-to-do young french child who had a darkroom and camera when he was very young, this girl was exposed to mercury and suffered her entire life...” You can imagine the silence in the room when we got to the Daguerreotypes at the end of the list.

In the following days, I stopped to consider the absurdity of showing these images to students who really were expecting something much warmer and sweeter. I had tried to show photographers who were significant names in the history of photography (which is part of my job given that the course satisfies an arts elective). However, if you step out of your preconceptions of photo-history, the images are pretty horrific.

I think that those of us with children tend to filter a lot of what we see through our experience as parents. When I was twenty-five, I found sleeping baby images to be fascinating. Now that I have taken three a.m. trips to the emergency room with a colicky infant, I tend to see my own child laying in the images. And understand the heartbreak those 19th century parents must have felt.

I can also understand why my students were put off by the images.

Isn’t there a way to meet them halfway? To let them voice their love of pea-pod babies and still talk about Sally Mann? Is getting them to improve their own images of their children enough? It is, after all, why a lot of them are taking the class. Where do we find the balance between the images we devoured as graduate students, and the images our students are ready to see?

By the way, I regularly show a clip on YouTube from a PBS documentary about Jacob Riis. I know the voice of the narrator, but can never remember his name. At any rate, toward the end of the clip is a segment about infant mortality in New York at the turn of the century, with a description of mothers walking the streets at night holding children dieing of dysentery or T.B. I tear up a little in class when I show it now. Again, you always filter it through your own experience. Plus, the video has a sound glitch right at that point, which makes the whole room jump out of their seats. You can't embed the video, but it is here.

Monday, July 19, 2010

Update Photography I rubrics.

In Effective Grading; A Tool for Learning and Assessment, Barbara Walvoord and Virginia Johnson Anderson lay out a strategy for using a system of rubrics to expedite grading and assessment. Walvoord and Anderson call their rubric system PTA Scales - Primary Trait Analysis Scales. The principal is simple. You can clearly articulate the traits you are looking for in student work. You describe, in plain language, several different levels of success for each of those traits. Each level of success is given a value. In effect, you have a tool for collecting data about your student’s success across the traits you are measuring.

You can use the PTA to articulate to students at the outset of a project what success or failure looks like. You can use the PTA to simplify and speed up grading. Most importantly, you can use the data you collect to measure student learning in your courses and as a basis for assessment of your courses.

If you’ve never read the book and you teach, go to Amazon now and order a copy. It was a career-changing discovery for me when I found it - it clarified so much that I had difficulty understanding about my courses. And on more than one occasion, I have used information gleaned from course assessment to make valuable changes to my classes. The PTA stuff is just the beginning, really.

At any rate, my Photography I assignments all have a PTA associated with them. Unfortunately, they were all written more than five years ago when I taught at another institution, in a different darkroom, with a different group of students.

Also, Rochester Community and Technical College has been making a big push on institutional assessment, and there are a lot of assessment tools floating around my job. The school seems to have agreed on a format for laying out these tools that is different than the ones I created on my own five years ago. I made a couple of major mistakes then, and finally felt like it was time to make some changes.

The rubrics I made originally were formatted vertically, with traits running down the page. They were really wordy. They tended to have incomplete, run-on sentences. They weren’t relevant to printing on RC paper and using easels with fixed borders, like we do here in the darkroom at RCTC. They ran across multiple pages. When it was time to use the rubrics for grading, I was intimidated. Imagine how my students felt about reading them on D2L.

You can find an original rubric here, for an artificial light project.

I wanted rubrics that were short and concise. I wanted rubrics that fit on one page. I wanted rubrics that looked more like what is quickly becoming RCTC’s institutional standard - a horizontal grid with values running across columns and traits running down rows. Most importantly, I need to update the content to reflect printing with RC paper, in fixed-border easels like we do in the RCTC darkroom. I wanted rubrics I wasn’t afraid to read when it was time to grade.

You can find the updated rubric here, for the same project.

I am always happy to share more rubrics or projects, leave a comment or send an email if you are interested in talking more.

Friday, July 16, 2010

Thomas Barrow, Charlotte Cotton and "The Amazing Fish Cam".

My friend Javier wrote me this morning with a link to an interview with Thomas Barrow by David Ondrik in issue nine of Finitefoto. You can find the article here.

I first read about Thomas Barrow in Jonathan Green’s American Photography: a Critical History 1945 to Present. I was a high school student in the mid 1980's in Albuquerque. I was also hanging around in the fine art museum at the University of New Mexico and I was very aware of Barrow’s work. I had read about it in Green’s book and realized there were more than a few Albuquerque connections to contemporary photography. If you grew up in Albuquerque in the 1980’s, you were amazed that Albuquerque had connections to anything contemporary; the fact that it dealt with photography and art was sort of a bonus.

Barrow has a really fascinating CV – He’s part of a lineage that goes right back to Beaumont Newhall and the invention of the history of photography. He was one of the reasons I so badly wanted to go to the University of New Mexico for graduate school.

I have always suspected that the generation of photographers like Barrow who founded MFA programs in the 1970’s boon of G.I. Bill money must have all been lovers, drinking buddies or mortal enemies. Their world was so small then, and they were busy defining what photography in academia would look like. They were also busy building the network of galleries and opportunities that would define the careers of art photographers for a couple of decades. They were movers and shakers, and at the beginning of the 1970’s, I bet there were about two dozen of them in the United Sates that really mattered. Just a guess.

So I was really interested in the quote below, from Barrow, because it touches, in a round about way, on something that I haven’t been able to articulate for a number of years.

“Nathan Lyons used to ask, when you’re looking at a picture do you see the picture or do you see what you want to see? Your eye really isn’t open to fresh things with photography, you have expectations with photos and they aren’t very great. I’m still disappointed after 40 years that people aren’t very demanding of photography.”

O.K. – be patient with me, as there is one other important anecdote.

In the early 1990’s the UNM art department had a room called “The Computer Closet”, which consisted of four or five Macs. It was the department’s early foray into digital imaging. But what the space was really used for was graduate students exploring this nifty new thing called “The Internet”, and thanks to Netscape 2.0, the Internet suddenly had pictures.

The Computer Closet was also next to Patrick Nagatani’s office, so Tom Barrow would frequently poke his head in and marvel at the complete lack of art-making happening on the expensive computers.

One day, he folded his hands together, shrugged his shoulders and sighed – “This Internet thing...it will be like C.B. radio. It’s a fad and in a few years it will be over.”

To be fair, at that moment, there were four graduate students looking at one computer showing something called “The Amazing Fish-Cam”. Someone at Netscape had set a camera up next to their fish tank and a computer would post an image on the web every minute or so. I’m pretty sure we graduate students thought it was hysterical. I think Barrow was disappointed in the waste of potential he saw in the room. In retrospect, I can appreciate that Barrow couldn’t foresee a world where a dot-com crash would soon have the power to wipe out his 401k.

I think we all understood that Photoshop would be a disruptive force for photographic image making. But no one in that small closet could have predicted the way that instant communication of images and ideas over the Internet would be so disruptive in their coming careers as artists.

It’s obvious now, that blogs and camera phones disrupt news and newsgathering. A slip of the tongue or a snide comment at a stump speech in the middle of nowhere ends a political career.

And the same thing happened to the gatekeepers and power structure of photography; or in this case, photography in the academy.

A new generation of gatekeepers came to photography after academic training in other fields. The Internet or the blog-o-sphere is where they found their voice. Jen Bekman and Jorge Colberg encapsulate the new power structure of photo as art. Bekman’s career of working in the web industry and starting a photo gallery after the dot-com bust is the ultimate refutation of Barrow’s early evaluation of the Internet’s potential. My understanding is that Colberg is a astrophysicist who came to an interest in photography later in his academic career. And he certainly champions work that is the polar opposite of what Barrow does.

I suspect another important change in the structure of photo gatekeeping was the publishing of Charlotte Cotton’s The Photograph as Contemporary Art. The book is a narrative of photo-history that starts with the very last illustrations in Newhall or Rosenblum’s books and champions artists who they didn’t discuss much.

In fact, Cotton’s narrative starts at about the time I was sitting in a closet in Albuquerque laughing at a pair of fish belonging to a Netscape employee in Mountain View, California. That’s probably why reading her book took me so completely off-guard. I wasn’t out in the art world or the darkroom like I should have been. I was on the Internet in that closet looking at much, much more stupid stuff.

Like Cotton; Bekman, Colberg and the generation of photographers they are cultivating aren’t particularly beholden to the Newhall-Coke lineage of photography from which Barrow descends. They don’t really owe anything to Barrow’s generation of image makers – image makers like Robert Heinecken or Judith Golden or educators like Harold Jones. The L.A.- Chicago connection has lost ground to William Eggleston and Stephen Shore.

A new generation of photographers are also more likely to work with color, more likely to make inkjet prints, and less likely to cut their images apart and caulk them back together. They are photographers who are interested in the documentary qualities of photography. They are not to trying to disrupt a viewers assumptions about the photographic image – which is sort of key to Barrow's work.

I live and teach in the third largest city in a flyover state. From where I am sitting, having my work show up on Bekman or Colberg’s blog would be a much more valuable career moment than showing work at a place like the Etherton Gallery in Tucson or the Blue Sky Gallery in Portland. The work would get instant, international exposure, and I might not have to print or frame anything. The career trajectory of new photographers seems to be that you pay money to go to a portfolio review, hoping to get your work on a blog, I’m not sure what the next step is after that. A Blurb book?

Let me say, also, that because I live in a flyover state, having access to Bekman and Colberg; or the discussion that Alec Soth, David Ondrik, Deywoud Bey, David Bram, James Pomerantz, Aline Smithson, the collective of voices at the now defunct NYMPHOTO and countless others foster have been a life line. It is now possible to participate in, or lurk near, a conversation about photography from some fairly remote places. Thank you.

Now if one of you would just point a web-cam at your fish tank.

Tom, if you stumble on this, I am sorry my writing hasn’t gotten any better since graduate seminar in 1994.

Balloon, Rochester, MN. 2008.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Some Tips for Exposing Film with Artificial Light.


My students are in the middle of an artificial light project as I write. I wanted a chance to jot down a couple of suggestions, there are some common problems that can be avoided with some foresight.
  • Get a tripod. You will likely be exposing film at very long shutter times and your camera will move if you try to hand hold it. You can pick up an o.k. tripod at Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy or Ritz photo here in Rochester. Also, the Technology Services office in the atrium will check out tripods to RCTC students with a current I.D. There is no reason to do this project without a tripod.
  • Use a cable release or your camera’s self-timer to trip the shutter. If you press the shutter with your finger while you are making a long exposure, you will make the whole camera shift. Even if you are using a tripod. A cable release is something you might still find at Ritz or Best Buy in Rochester, certainly, you could make a drive up to the cities and find one. Most of your cameras have self-timers, and that may be a better option.
  • You will need to adjust your exposure time for something called “Reciprocity Failure”. Film reciprocity is the property of film that lets us change f-stop and shutter speed combinations and still have a good exposure. For example, f.8 @ 125 is the same exposure as f.11 @ 60. When you are making really long or really short exposures, that all breaks down. Above is a chart Kodak produces for Tri-X film which indicates how to adjust your time if your exposure is longer than a half a second. It should work well for the Arista Premium we are using in class. According to the chart, if your indicated exposure is ten seconds, you should either open up two stops in the aperture, or expose for fifty seconds to get the proper exposure.
  • Meter for the light that is important. If you are photographing someone under a streetlight, be sure and walk right up to them and fill your viewfinder with their face. That will insure that the dark alley behind you isn’t throwing off your meter.
  • Bracket, Bracket, Bracket. If your camera indicates an exposure of one full second, you should also make exposures for ten seconds and a minute. You probably can’t overexpose, so go crazy.
  • Shoot one roll first, and take good notes. If you expose one roll under the lighting conditions you want to use, you can develop it by itself and figure out if you are on the right track before you invest too much time on the rest of the project. If you write down the frame number, f-stop and shutter speed, you will know which exposure times work and which don’t.
  • Have some fun, dang it. See what weird light sources work - try your car headlights, or a car spot-light. Try glow sticks. Try a campfire. Try a flashlight.

Monday, July 12, 2010

What Digital Camera Should I Buy?

I get a number of emails or requests each month from people asking which digital camera they should buy for the color photography course at Rochester Community and Technical College. There isn’t an easy answer to that, especially given that most of the people who ask are on a student budget. Basically, a reasonable camera for the course should be capable of fully manual exposure, shoot in the RAW file format, and be a single lens reflex camera.

Here is a list of suggested cameras as of summer, 2010. The list isn’t comprehensive, and is totally biased by my own brand preferences. But here you go.

I will need to sell blood (<$600)

• The photography program at Rochester Community and Technical College has half a dozen Canon digital SLR cameras available for check out, and we pick up a few more each semester. You will have to put up with the inconvenience of bringing the camera back in every couple of days, but many students have gotten through the class this way.

• You are welcome to use color film in the camera you used for Photo I. You will have to pay for the film (and probably order it on-line) and pay for development. You will also have to factor in the time of scanning the roll to make a contact sheet and scanning the negatives for the final images. But it’s doable.

Good (around $600)

• Pentax K-x (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/PX06032/)
• Nikon D3000 (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/NZ0300/)
• Canon Rebel XS (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/EC2827/)

Better ($600 - $1000)

• Canon EOS Rebel T1I EF-S (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/EC2841/)
• Nikon D5000 (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/NZ0501/)

Best ($1000 - $2000)

• Canon EOS 7D (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/EC27101/)
• Canon EOS 50D (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/EC2751KW/)
• Nikon D90 (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/NZ0091/)
• Nikon D300 Body Only, No Lens (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/NZ1305/)
• Pentax K-7 Body Only, No Lens (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/PX0607/)
• Sony A850 Body Only, No Lens (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/SZ0825/)

Seriously, I’m going pro ($2000 - $3000)

• Canon 5D Mark II Body Only, No Lens (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/EC2705/)
• Nikon D700 Body Only, No Lens (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/NZ1400/)
• Nikon D300 (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/NZ1306/)


Money is no object, and I only want the best (>$3000)

• Canon 5D Mark II (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/EC2706/)
• Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III Body Only, No Lens (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/EC2775/)
• Nikon D3S Body Only, No Lens (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/NZ240305/)
• Nikon D3X Body Only, No Lens (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/NZ24031/)
• Nikon D700 (http://www.calumetphoto.com/item/NZ1401/)