Photography Class
I feel quite lucky to have the opportunity to teach a photography class this summer. It’s a weird feeling, because it was really the first subject I ever taught and I’ve spent at least thirty years being intensely involved with it. I put it down around five years ago as a practitioner but not as a theorist. There is a downside—six class meetings of four hours each. Though God may have created the universe in that span, communicating something about photography with such constraints is daunting. I don’t feel god-like at all.
It was billed as an introductory class in making digital pictures, so I cannot simply do a survey of the history of photography—though I can’t resist bringing that to bear. There are a broad range of students in the class from advanced to just starting out, and I’m trying to resist the urge to teach to the upper third. But the theory behind image-making activities, if better understood, can help accelerate development far better than maintaining a strictly technical focus. You only learn and remember technique when you figure out something that you want to do.
The arc of the class, as I have conceived it, is simply this: technology, space, time, light, sequence and captioning, and then final presentations of each student’s photographic project. This week, we discussed technology and space.
Heidegger in the Bedroom
Me: I don’t really get this at all. (handing book to girlfriend)
She: (begins reading aloud)The essence of technology lies in enframing. Its holding sway begins with destining. Since destining at any given time starts man on the way to revealing, man, thus underway, is continually approaching the possibility of pursuing and pushing forward nothing but what is revealed in ordering, and of deriving all his standards on this basis.She: What’s destining?
Me: I don’t know.
She: Oh, so he made it up. (continues reading)Through this the other possibility is blocked, that man might be admitted more and sooner and ever more primally to the essence of what is unconcealed and to its unconcealment, in order that he might experience as his essence the requisite belonging to revealing.Me: I don’t remember that last part.
Now is the time on Sprockets when we dance.
