Michael A. Vuksta
Standing on some deserted city street on Sunday to catch the sunrise (or having found a comfortable sitting rock in the forest at sunset), I wait to see which tenement window or which aluminum street lamp (or which spot in the forest’s elevation of green petals and black poles) will initially (or finally) be licked by the day’s sunlight. As if to anticipate or suggest that this spot were made more sacred by its blessing. . .
I have at times been successful viewing photographs with students in my classes. During one of my classes this past year we discussed a single photograph for an entire onehour class period. We began by listing the objects in the photograph and then described them in more detail. Finally, we began to make subjective associations based on the elements in the photograph. We had begun to accept photographs as a medium that allows us to think and to feel. The students returned the next day cheerfully anticipating a repetition of the previous days visual reading.
We began to experience the photograph, not just see its preserved representations. Language, too, can create experience. Yet it is difficult for students to grasp the potential of either medium to do this, and doing so constitutes the first real lesson of this unit. Only when students see feeling in a photograph or language, and thus in turn use these media to express their own feelings, can they begin the process of creation and discovery.
In order to get to the experience of seeing creatively, the students need to be able to see and describe physical characteristics with clarity. Initially, it may seem paradoxical to try to improve the students’ descriptive abilities of the apparent in order to prepare them to be sensitive to the intuitive. But, in photography as well as in writing, it is necessary that one knows what the point of reference for a metaphor is in order to understand the allusions and associations which that metaphor is intended to convey.
In the
ACTIVITIES
section of this unit, I have included a description of the photograph which my class discussed for the class session. I include it to illustrate the skills which I hope that this unit will educe: the skills of detailed and accurate written accounts of description.
Everyone is aware of the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words. It is my interpretation that this phrase is an equation and the relationship of word and image is reciprocal. It is not to be understood simply as a photograph being a substitute for words. A photograph can evoke many words. The description of the photograph which is in the
ACTIVITIES
section of this unit and Agee’s and Evans’s photo text are examples of this interpretation. Like Agee, I have described objects and their location and physical relation to each other. And yet, I have not finished with my engagement with the photograph. I have yet to express its possible meaning: what it makes me think and feel. This aspect of understanding is approachable only in words. Photography, while capable of revealing appearances, cannot provide the context necessary for meaning.
So far, I have been writing like I photograph. I have been touched by a pair of incidents with my students: Denise’s exposure of her private collection of family photographs and a successful engagement with a more public photograph. I have seen a sudden flash of light and then an array of light and the patterns and textures it creates. Agee and Evans have provided this flash—an opportunity to use a document from the past to begin to stir the mind and memory of children to get them to understand the expressive potential of words and pictures; more specifically, the need for words to provide a context for public as well as private images.
Photographs are relics of the past, traces of what has happened. If the living take that past upon themselves, if the past becomes an integral part of the process of people making their own history, then all photographs would reacquire a living context, they would continue to exist in time, instead of being arrested moments. . . . Such a memory would encompass any image of the past, however tragic, however guilty, within its own continuity. The distinction between the private and public uses of photography would be transcended.
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The transcendence from a descriptive (see Heading I. “Description” in the
ACTIVITIES
section of this paper) to a conceptual level is the next major lesson of this course. The third section of the
ACTIVITIES
section of this paper illustrates the conceptual content of
VISUAL READING
in this case the subject is the same photograph which I used to illustrate the detailed description.
Before explaining in detail the activities that I will use as a part of this curriculum unit, I am providing a brief summary and critical review of the photographs and words that compose the primary source for these activities.