I've recently been doing a write up of my first real teaching experience and it's made me do some serious thinking (dangerous, I know). For my Vocational Practice module I was given a second year undergraduate photography student as a tutee. We had to hold two tutorials, the first in person and the second online via Microsoft Teams.
In my opening email to my tutee, "D", I introduced myself and let him know why I was emailing him. I gave him a list of dates and times I was available for our first meeting, and asked him to respond with his chosen time and a short description of the area of his work. To my initial dismay, D replied that his current project had a focus on street photography and portraiture, which if you know my work or have read my blog is not something I have a wealth of experience with. I was quite nervous about this experience anyway, teaching is not something I've ever felt drawn to do, but the fact my tutee was doing work of a different genre to my own turned that anxiety up to 11. I was willing to give it a go however, not like I really had much choice in the matter anyway, so I began preparing notes to take with me. I wrote down potential questions to ask him (about his concept and direction, his equipment, and any future plans to begin with) as well as going through any information I could find on street photography and portraiture on film. I at least had a small amount of experience with portraits from my final undergrad project where I had to take images of my Dad's face but other than that and the casual photos I have taken of friends to fill my photo album, I felt wholly under prepared for this. I took books out of the library, I trawled forums and watched what must have been hours of videos on street photography and portraiture techniques. By the time the tutorial rolled around, I had a list of a variety of artists I could suggest to D, depending on what his work actually looked like, and a lot of theory under my belt that I didn't have beforehand. Even if I couldn't help D, I certainly helped myself.
Coming into the tutorial, D seemed to have many of the same concerns as I did in my second year of undergrad. A large portion of that worry came from the production of a 'sketchbook'. "What goes in a sketchbook for photography?" I hear you cry, or at least that's what I said when I was first told we had to keep one. We aren't going to life drawing classes, and for the most part won't be constructing compositions and such before creating the scene to photograph (although, that doesn't apply to every type of photography), so what the hell do you put in one? I could see that D had put a lot of time and effort into the presentation of his sketchbook, there was a lot of anxiety over how it looked which lead to a very thin amount of content. I had explained to him that a sketchbook isn't a portfolio and that whilst he is going to be graded on it, it is much better to look at it as a tool to organise plans and ideas, a reference guide for his work. The sketchbook doesn't need to be polished and immaculate to get the best grades, it needs to help him make as much sense of his photographic journey as possible. If that is personally best done through neat titles and bullet points in different coloured fine liners then by all means go for it, but if scribbling down notes with the closest pen available and sticking in pages from other notebooks will better help him organise his project then that's what it should be. Unsuccessful prints in the darkroom? Stick them in the sketchbook and write a short note about why it was unsuccessful and how that can maybe be avoided in the future. Thoughts regarding any facet of the project swimming round your head at 100mph? List them down in a way that benefits you the most. Quick notes from tutorials? Slap 'em in the sketchbook.
I asked D about any artist research he had done and he said he was finding it hard to come across photographers that really resonated with him and what he wanted to create, especially with the library only running a click and collect service. I supplied a few photographers from my researched and pre-written list (I was very happy I was able to provide artists relevant to the style of work D was undertaking that he also hadn't looked at) as well as artists of other mediums. It seemed to me that D hadn't considered looking at artists that didn't fit into the 'photographer' box, where in reality you can research any artists as long as it is relevant in some shape or form to how you are conducting your own studies. I gave examples of artists I had looked at for my previous projects with professions ranging from the obvious photographers to painters, print makers, mixed-media artists, directors, and cinematographers.
Another pressing issue D said he had with his project was deciding whether he should ask permission of people in the streets before photographing them. Again, this is something I have struggled with in the past and it probably plays a little into my preference for capturing landscape images, but it's also something that every photographer has a different opinion on. D was worried that in asking permission, the scene could become visually forced or staged, but that asking one the image is taken wouldn't be any good as unlike with a digital image, an image on film cannot be deleted once its been taken. My advice to him on this count was, if not having permission is stopping you from taking an image then you should ask for it. If you not asking means you won't take the picture, then if you ask and they say no you also won't be taking the picture, so you have nothing to lose. However, if he wanted to take the pictures but get rid of some of the anxiety that comes from having a camera round your neck in public, I suggested he look into using a cable release. That way, he could set up his camera on a tripod facing the scene he wanted to capture, then wait for people to get into frame as he wished and he could snap a picture without it being too obvious what he is doing, and without drawing the attention on anyone nearby. I personally never leave my cable release at home when taking my camera out and about, especially with my current pinhole project needing such long exposure times.
D and I analysed what he considered to be his most successful images and why he considered them so. A lot of the aspects he liked the most was the way the light fell in certain scenes, especially the ones with a persons face as the focus of the image. He felt like a lot of this was a 'right place right time' situation and wanted to be able to hit that balance more consistently. I had asked is Damon had any experience in the lighting studio at the School of Art, to which he said minimal. So I suggested as an activity he could work at before our next tutorial, he could either work on getting more comfortable with his sketchbook content, or he could play around in the lighting studio. To my surprise he said he would like to take on both. We spoke about what he could be looking at in the studio, focusing on playing around with light sources for portraits which would hopefully help give him some practical experience in a controlled environment so that when he did venture outside next he could more easily identify light sources and how they would fall on a face in specific positions. D mentioned that this is where the cable release could come in extra handy as he could evaluate the lighting of a scene and set up his camera waiting for someone to walk into the spot he wanted them to be in - it seemed like whatever I was doing it was getting through to him!
We left off on a positive tone, and D had said this tutorial had helped him become a lot clearer with what he needed to do next to consolidate his concept. I mentioned that he could contact me at any time for any help, and that if he wanted to see my old sketchbook for some pointers he was more than welcome to have a flick through it. It just so happened I was sitting in on a second year photographic process workshop the next day and D asked if I would bring it to the session so he could look at it after. I made sure to explain that not everything in my sketchbook would be a relevant page to include in his and he certainly shouldn't be copying what I had done, but instead use it as a guide and apply it to his own project.
Coming into our second tutorial, this time conducted online, D seemed to be a lot more upbeat regarding the direction of his project. He had spent some time in the lighting studio and not only had gotten some great prints out of it, but he felt he understood lighting in scenes a lot better now which was the aim of the activity to art with. His sketchbook was no longer such a source of anxiety which pleased me greatly, and he said he was closer to honing in on what exactly draws him to street photography/portraiture. In the interim between tutorials, D had also managed to secure some dark room time and had been experimenting with different enlarger settings and development times to attain exactly the sort of print he wanted. With his submission coming up I asked him if he had thought about how he wanted to present his work, it would be a lot more different now then when I had to submit my second year work purely because of coronavirus restrictions making it an online submission instead of an in person portfolio discussion, but that doesn't mean presentation isn't important. I gave some pointers on how to take the best images of his work to put in the online submission, and I asked him how he would have liked them to be presented if it weren't an online submission. We spoke about print size, choice of paper, the order of the images. Even if not all of the info we spoke about was completely relevant to the online aspect, I felt it was a worthwhile endeavor and it seemed to get him thinking about his work in a way he maybe hadn't approached in much depth before.
I was very pleased with the work D had undertaken between the tutorials, and the progress he seemed to have made not only in terms of work, but how much more confident in his artistic creations he seemed to be. I was surprised at how much my view on teaching and mentoring had changed since the beginning of this assignment. I left the second tutorial feeling elated to have been able to see a student grow in such a short amount of time, and was shocked at how well I seemed to do. At then end of our online tutorial I asked D for some feedback so I could gauge if it had gone as well as I thought it had. I asked him to be as honest as possible and to not be worried about upsetting me as after all I have to do an honest write up of my performance. He seemed genuine in his feedback, he said our tutorials were always on target and any advice I gave seemed to be tailored to him rather than just general advice, he finished off with a smile when he said these tutorials had been incredibly useful for him and thanked me. I wished him luck with his submission date and said even though our official communication was coming to an end, he could contact me at any time in the future if he felt he wanted or needed to. D said he would let me know how his submission went once he got the results, and even now long after our second tutorial I cannot wait to hear how he did. I know this was only a very small taste of what teaching is like, but I surprised myself with how quickly I began to love it.
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