Teaching Photo

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Published in Smithsonian American Art Journal, Smithsonian American Art Museum, fall 2007.

Teaching Photography as Art: A Short History
(an excerpt)

Throughout photography’s history, photographic “training” has been as diverse as the varieties and genres of photographs that exist. The direct instruction passed between master and apprentice, professional and assistant, friend to friend—still an important if not the most important form of training—was early on supplemented by a rich instructional literature in the form of periodicals and manuals, not to mention the development of technology so intuitive to use as to seem to teach photography all by itself. What concerns me here is the development of the advanced study of photography in academies, colleges and universities in the United States. I wish to trace a genealogy of photographic education in the arts over approximately a century, to look into its premises, its conceits and its challenges. It may well be that art photography is ultimately a form of applied photography with its own evolving rules and conventions—much like professional standards of commercial, media and scientific photography. This supposition is worth examining. But art photography has also harbored a larger promise—to probe and perhaps harness photography toward insight and cultural contribution. It is precisely in the context of teaching photography as art that questions of what photography can do become questions of what it is and can be. The promise of teaching photography as art is precisely an awareness of photography’s refulgent complexity and its turbulent importance.

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In the main, [university programs in photography] have adapted in the last decade to remain conduits to the art world, keeping pace with the decisive turn toward residually post-modern decorative formalism. The leading university programs now proceed according to what might be called a slanted parallelism in which more or less blatant careerism and authentic artistic development run side by side—converging, conveniently, at the graduate’s horizon. In the context of a highly professionalized art world, this often amounts to a photographic education premised on the refinement of what might be called imperfect mimicry, in which young artists study the aesthetics, history, theory and contemporary trends in photography and other fields—each of these having made their way into photographic education over the decades—for the sake of whatever minimal variance from the given becomes cognizable as a signature and hence “originality.”
A century of innovations in photographic education is legible in many ways in the arrival of photography into the very center of the art world today. On the other hand, the history of photographic education suggests multiple alternatives to the exhibition-based model that currently prevails for students and faculty alike as the readiest term of success in the practice of advanced photographic art. Some of these alternatives have rich traditions and some are just emerging—the photobook, the serialized periodical, the collaborative photo project, the interactive DVD, the hyperlinked web-based photo experience, various heterogenous forms of photo-circulation and public art outside the gallery-museum nexus, not to mention the limitless combinations of original photographic work and social research. It is clear that universities will prosper, if nothing else, as clearing houses for students and faculties in the thrall of collateral visions achievement held over from the past, and modish visions of achievement with a prescribed (if not easy) payoff. It remains indeterminate to what extent the university will grasp itself as an independent cultural space for photographers and artists invested in photography’s unique position as an interdisciplinary form and forum for visual studies.

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