“She gave me the greatest gift any teacher can give. She gave me her interest; she stimulated my imagination and she gave me confidence.” Katherine Hepburn.
If I can do one thing as a teacher it would be to inspire confidence and encourage enthusiasm for the medium of photography. My other suggestion to students: Be Yourself! Don’t be afraid to trust your gut, experiment, make mistakes, and enjoy being a beginner! In my class I allow students to explore their own interests, rather than mine. We learn how to load our cameras, compose good photographs, develop film, dry film, cut film, make a contact sheet, then put the negative in the enlarger and make a print. Film is not as instant as digital! It takes a bit of work. Its a lot like baking a cake you follow a recipe and it requires a bit of patience. As this is a beginning class I try not to tell someone that a certain subject has been done before. Just because Ansel Adams did landscape before you – doesn’t mean that you can’t explore landscape photography if that is what excites you. I will try and tease out your vision, help you to identify what topic/subject excites you visually. How do we communicate using images? I will give you my educated advice but I can’t tell you the exact road to Rome, as its all a bit subjective. That’s art for you. There are no straight answers, only more questions, and some punch lines.
Paula Gillen on a field trip with her Photo 1 class in 1981. Mercer County Community College, Trenton, NJ. We actually had real 35 mm cameras that were new at the time!
Final projects from my class: UCD Spring 2010.
A photograph by Chenyue Ma (Intro to Photo) UCD – also known as YK. She likes Radio Head, animals, and is a vegetarian. This photograph was from her final project. With this project she explored images of models using vegetables as fun props. She had a sharp eye and a creative mind and is an economic major who took to photography like a duck to water! This photograph was sepia toned to create the brownish color.
A photograph by one of my Intro to Photo students: Ron Brauch. He is interested in tattoo designs and this past semester experimented with overlaying his tattoo designs on his portraits. For this image he created a line drawing on tracing paper that was about the same size as the print, after the initial exposure to the negative, he placed the tracing paper over the paper for a second exposure. The line from the tracing paper created the white lines on the models face. The student model is Niki. Thank you to Ron and Niki for letting me share their work.
Currently I am teaching an Intro to Photography class, at the University of Colorado, Denver. I am finishing up my second semester of teaching and its going a bit smoother this time around! It is refreshing to be dealing with an analog medium again. I enjoy handling “35mm film” and “fiber based silver gelatin based prints, ” these objects now seem so tangible, so permanent, after managing those evasive pixels and multiple back up hard drives. And I forgot how soothing it is to work in a lab, to enter a darkened room, lit only with the yellow/red safe light. It encloses the students in a soft glow, with only the sound of trickling water in the background to break up the silence. It feels more like a visit to a Zen Monastery rather standing in a university photo lab in the middle of Denver. It is a bit like time traveling to return to a practice and form that I first started using in the mid 1970’s.
Escape from pixels. I am in the process of showing students how to print negatives & create their own silver gelatin prints. We rock the trays to encourage fresh developer to reach the chemistry on the surface of the paper. The film is developed using metal tanks in a special film developing room (temperature controlled!). After the film is dry, and cut into strips we walk through a zig zag light trap doorway, to enter the darkroom and set up by our enlargers, there we expose the paper to light. The paper we are using is RC Ilford Multi grade paper.
Early in the semester I reduce photography and the camera into their basic elements, so a fancy 35 mm camera is reduced to a portable black box with pin hole or in our case with modern 35mm a glass lens. I talk about time (shutter speed) and focus (depth of field) as the two main principles they need to master as beginning photographers. I like to show historical images of the camera obscura and pin hole photography. My favorite photographer to show at this point is Ableardo Morell’s and his camera obscura images found on his website: http://www.abelardomorell.net/
Below is a final project from one of my students who studied with me – Fall 2009, UC D Intro to Photography class. It is a sequence of words and images by Nhia Xiong, expressing the emotions she felt and experienced about her father who has passed away.
A few examples from this semester Into to Photography class at UC Denver. Photograms, painting with developer, light painting, and some stop and blur action.
