Secret Games
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Sometimes I think I disguise myself as a teacher in order
to make the pictures I need to see. It’s my secret game—to
see the world through others’ perceptions as much as
my own, to make my work their work, and their work my own.
The years I’ve spent teaching amount to an ongoing collaborative
exploration. When I started out, teaching photography to children
was so exceptional that it seemed a pedagogical stunt. But
I soon came to understand that I wanted to do more than provide
students with an outlet; I wanted to challenge categorical
distinctions between art and documentary photography, between
photographer and subject, child and adult. It also became
clear to me that our school systems are constructed according
to white middle-class values: linear thinking, tidiness, an
overly earnest dedication to doing things “the right
way”—even though, in many cases, the students are
neither white nor middle class and even though there are many
other ways of seeing and experiencing life. So I tried to
find ways of bringing my students’ worlds – as opposed
to the system’s Dick-and-Jane world – into the classroom.
An important part of my work is making educational models
which can be used by teachers and community workers. I’ll
create a collaborative project with my students that deals
with an issue of immediate importance to them—race and
identity, let’s say, as in a project called Black Self/White
Self, in which the students imagine themselves as a member
of another race. Whatever the project, it usually begins as
an image in my mind—a portrait with writing on it, or
a letter of the alphabet illustrated by some homely object—which
I then “reverse-engineer” into an educational exercise.
In order to expand the children’s notion of photography,
I give them assignments that are relevant to their lives,
starting with what they know intimately – their own selves
and their families; then looking outward, to their community;
and from there to a more freewheeling concept, their dreams.
I also urge them to write about themselves, their families,
and their fantasies. In contrast to the usual school assignment,
the outcomes here are not predetermined; there is no “right”
answer.
Sometimes I make portraits of the students. Sometimes they
write text to accompany the picture, sometimes they write
directly on the photograph. In the Black Self/White Self project,
white and African- American students posed for my camera as
their white selves, then as their black selves. I did not
anticipate, and could never even have imagined, that one of
my African-American students would portray himself as a white
angel, while another portrayed himself as disheveled and homeless.
Both were describing their white selves.
Art made in the course of an educational/collaborative process
has generally been thought of as separate from work made by
a solo auteur (not to say less important). But art since Warhol
has become less of an elite enterprise, and my approach plays
with the viewer’s changing expectations, keeping the
question of authorship in the foreground. Who is the photographer?
Who is seeing and who is being seen? Who is the teacher, who
is the student?
And what might the educational implications be? For one thing,
the relationship between photographer and student becomes
reciprocal rather than hierarchical. Most importantly, the
students’ attitude to their work—because it is their
work about their lives, rather than predictable responses
to the teacher’s expectations —takes on a charge
of energy that often carries over into conventional school
work. Teachers I’ve worked with have said that this approach
fosters methodical, sequential reasoning, along with expressive
writing and critical thinking.
Early on, it became clear to me that my students’ work,
whatever its educational merit, was something more than cute
mimicry of mass-media imagery; we were not coaching the photographic
equivalent of marching bands. The kids’ pictures are
a far cry from the kitsch photography of adorable children
that characterizes do-good projects, the sort of product that
confirms packaged ideas about innocence. Because innocence
is such a treasured condition, we and our schools welcome
assurances that children are developmentally predictable,
that at any given time there are certain essential experiences
they cannot know.
For better or worse, the often menacing images my students
produce do not bolster this assurance. I’ve worked in
many parts of the US as well as in Latin America, Europe,
Asia and Africa. The variety of visions in these venues challenges
the assumption that children can be expected to say essentially
the same things wherever they are. The visions of the Dutch
children I worked with reflect the ordered, brilliantly lit
paintings of Vermeer’s time, while my Indian students’
pictures are clever manipulations of receding space and harsh
shadows. Their feelings— awe, apprehension, tenderness,
even despair—may be universal, but the expressions are
widely various. My students and I are not doing lessons but
a delicate kind of collaborative artistry, in which the images
draw their force directly from underlying cultural tensions.
To categorize this as children’s art would be to shortchange
the depth and subtleties of its effects. It’s not much
help to cite Conceptual Godfather Joseph Beuys’ coy remark
to the effect that everyone is an artist. Perhaps one should
simply agree with a curator friend of mine and say that there
is a robust mystery afoot in this kind of work, as there is
in all art, and that what we are seeing here is a dramatic,
vital development in the disassembly of the Olympian artist—and
a startlingly honest picture of the human heart and soul.
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