Digital Conversations
Visual Literacy and Collaboration, by Meg Griffiths
Photography students incoming, many born in the 2000’s, will have interfaced with digital devices such as cell phones, tablets, and computers most of their lives. Given this reality, particular challenges and responsibilities require educators in the 21st Century to create innovative curriculum, while embracing use of new (and existing) technology within the classroom, as well as to train student populations to use these devices in ways that support thoughtful research, active learning, and collaborative practice. But larger than this, our responsibility is to teach them what visual literacy is and means in the arts.
It is important, here, to be clear about what visual literacy means. As defined by Phillip Yenawine, former Director of Education at the Modern Museum of Art in New York, “Visual literacy is a set of abilities that enables an individual to effectively find, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media. Visual literacy skills equip a learner to understand and analyze the contextual, cultural, ethical, aesthetic, intellectual, and technical components involved in the production and use of visual materials. A visually literate individual is both a critical consumer of visual media and a competent contributor to a body of shared knowledge and culture.”
So, how do we go about helping students achieve this competency? How do we do this in a way that supports creativity, ignites curiosity, engages imagination, and prompts reflection in digital photography classes? These questions continue to come up among educators around the country at all levels from all areas: What is the best way to teach this course and how do we keep it fresh?
Taking into account that many students have been working with digital devices since elementary school or earlier, there are several complications to consider when teaching Digital Photography: 1) perception of knowledge versus actual knowledge of devices; 2) levels of immediacy with which they receive information, process and respond to that information; and 3) successful interaction in collaborative and meaningful ways with their peers.
While I cannot for the purposes of this article go about dissecting the ways a digital course or courses have or could be taught according to institutional needs and goals, I can speak to one particular way I teach a project which does engage students on these various levels and technological modes.
Recently I created a course called “Digital Conversations” in which students were assigned partners and required to create work in collaboration and in conversation with one another using various devices to form a larger body of work. The culmination of this project results in a slide show and a presentation opened to the class for discussion.
This project is the first one I give to the class. It precedes any formal tutorial on how to use a digital camera, cell phone camera, or processing software like Photoshop. The goal is to create a space for student assessment of strengths and weaknesses. This allows the instructor to shift course content according to student competency levels. This is a perfect way to move into the rest of the term.
The class is broken down into assigned groups of two. Each person is responsible for creating original photographic work with a digital device, which could be a digital camera or a cell phone. There is no discussion about subject matter, theme, shooting style, whether color or black and white, day or night, inside or outside.
To begin, one person within the group initiates collaboration by making the first image. This image is sent to their partner by email and text notifying them the project has begun. Their partner reads the image, and makes their own image in response and sends it back. The pair continues to send images back and fourth. There is little to no communication through spoken language, instead the conversation happens through images. This volley goes on until they create 20 images between them over the course of a week and a half. The students then meet, compile the images, label them with their initials, sequence them chronologically, and create a digital presentation for open discussion and critique in class.
While preparing their presentation, students look at their work and talk about what they made together and address inquiry prompts that I have provided. What are the themes that surface within the images? What do you notice about the particular way your partner makes images? How did you respond to this? Did the way in which you make images change based on how your partner was making? What was something unexpected you noticed about the work as a whole? What was challenging? How might you do things differently in the future?
There are five projected student learning outcomes for this project. First, they examine, identify and apply methods and tools employed by other contemporary artists who communicate through images. As inspiration for the project, I point them to sources such as a new nothing¹ and an exhibition entitled Talking Pictures-Camera Phone Conversations between Artist² devised by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Second, they individually create and share digital photographic artworks using camera phones, digital cameras, and the internet. The project supports and challenges students to consider the immediacy and content of this daily exchange, what they make and how they make and how they receive, process and respond to information. They learn to evaluate what is being offered them — the technical, formal, contextual, cultural, and aesthetic components of each photo, allowing them an informed opportunity to validate, counter or offer a non sequitur to the thread of visual communication.
Third, students begin to compile high quality digital works that illustrate proficiency in image processing. With this they learn what their strengths and weaknesses using processing software such as Photoshop while also comparing what their product with that of their classmates.
Fourth, students learn to collaborate — how to negotiate, problem solve, time manage, and experiment while creating original art works in communication with a partner. To achieve a shared goal, students are required to be active and respectful as they engage with their partner‘s creative work. As a result students learn to understand perspectives of both their partners and their classmates. It establishes at the outset of the course a precedent for a critique environment where openness and vulnerability are supported in the creative process
Finally, as these young photographers analyze, interpret and evaluate digital photographic pieces through presentations and class feedback, they may discover, as I have, the most concentrated and fruitful conversations about their work will come from engaging with peers.
Our goal as educators in the 21st Century is to teach visual literacy by demonstrating the value of making, appreciating, and supporting the arts — regardless of what field a student may ultimately choose to pursue. And we do this in an environment where some people question the value of teaching photography because everyone has a high quality camera embedded in their cell phone that is snapped “on the daily.” Even though we are working with a student population that interfaces with these devices constantly, there are ways to keep things fresh if we meet our students where they are, help them shift perception from what they think they know, to engaging the possibilities inherent in what they don’t.
1. http://anewnothing.com is a web platform created by Ben Alper and Nat Ward showcasing the work of various artists across the world who engage in two-person image-based conversations.
2. The Met commissioned 12 artists to participate in a project where two artists converse through images for a five-month period. From November 2016 to April 2017, the participants sent still images and brief videos back and forth in a game of pictorial ping-pong.
Meg Griffiths was born in Indiana and raised in Texas. She received two B.A.’s from the University of Texas in Cultural Anthropology and English Literature and earned her Master of Fine Arts in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design. She currently lives in Denton, Texas where she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Art at Texas Woman’s University.
