Michael A. Vuksta
Preliminaries
Description
The following is a description of the photograph mentioned in the text which I had used in my classroom:
The photograph by Sara Silver appeared on the cover of
Black+White
, The Yale Undergraduate Photography Review. In the foreground are two people. One of them is a bulky woman probably in her late thirties. She is facing away from the viewer. She is wearing a vertically striped, onepiece bathing suit slung deep to her lower back and suspended by two thin straps from her shoulders. Her dark hair is parted in the middle. Braids hang from either side of her head and meet at the center of her upper back just below the neck. They are joined there and contained in a thin elastic band. Below this band her hair remains hanging loosely in a doublecurl to a point on her back at about midshoulder blade. On her left hand she is wearing a ring. Her right wrist is wrapped in some sort of band. This hand is loosely laced between the fingers of the other person occupying the foreground of the picture. The frame ends just below the back of her knees. On the right scapular area of her back (and in the center of the picture frame) is a tattoo of a wingedhorse in flight. Whether it is a true Pegasus is of some question since the horse appears not to be a horse at all but a winged-unicorn.
The second person is standing about a halfstep further back from the person just described. The frame ends at midshin on him. He is a thin male of about the same age as the woman. He is facing the camera and his eyes appear to be aimed directly at the viewer. The crown of his head is bald and he has a full beard. His head is slightly tilted to his right (the viewer’s left) with a look of amused curiosity. A clay or wood pendant hangs from a leather strap around his neck. The central area of his torso is dappled with body hair. He is clad in a dark briefstyle bathing suit. His left hand hangs loosely at his side, fingers slightly curled, as the pad of the thumb rests on his outer thigh. The tension in his collarbones suggests that he has rolled back his shoulders to pose in response to the photographer’s presence.
The lowerright hand portion of the frame reveals that they stand on a concrete floor with a large and regular grid of expansion joints through it. The two people are inside a woodframed structure that begins to blur as we look into the receding (illusory) space of the photograph. In this area of the background, a portion of a blurred image of a carousel appears with a dotted array of lights, poles, horses, carriages and people. The strong light from the windows at the side of the building and the open wall of the back is overexposed and appears as bright paperwhite causing the metal poles of the carousel and the wooden frame of the windows to disappear. Separating this blurred background from the crisply focused foreground is a white picket fence. It is approximately waisthigh ascending left to right in an acute angle from the lower left-hand corner of the frame.
Viewing the Public Photograph
Students will begin their exploration by viewing slides of Evans’s photographs taken from the photo text
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
. This activity will take an entire onehour class period, allowing for each of the photographs to be observed for approximately one minute. Emphasis can be placed on observing the details rather than being overly concerned about what they mean.
Students can record any details impressions in a notebook or
journal which will be maintained throughout all the activities of this curriculum unit.
Ten Family Photos—Viewing the Private Photogrpah
As a follow up to this activity, children will be asked to bring in at least ten photographs of their families and friends. In order to emphasize the potential of photography to inform us about the past, the children should be asked to search for photographs of their grandparents or someone of a similar age. (Prearranged commercial portraits are acceptable but are not the greatest source for observing other details. They may be more useful when one introduces the reading into photographs.)
Writing Physical Descriptions from a Photograph
During the next class session we will select one of these photographs and write approximately 150 to 200 words describing the person(s) in the photograph. This description should attempt to limit itself to recording only physical appearances: clothing, background, other objects in the photograph and descriptions of any activity that the photographic subject is engaged in. Children must be directed to try not to speculate about an activity but only describe ones that are obvious by elements in the photograph itself.
Describing the Event of Photographing
If time permits or during the course of another class students can also describe the event taking place when this photograph was taken. Were they present at this event? Do they know who took the photograph? If not can they find out the answers to either of these questions? (This can be used as an assignment to be completed at home if these answers are unknown.)
Describing an Unknown Person from Another Students Photograph
As a final exercise in description the children will select a photograph from another student in the class and write a description of an unknown person. It is in this exercise that the students will begin to rely on their seeing and not on other previous knowledge and associations about the person or event.
The Greater Unknown or First Impressions
Describing the Public Photograph
Once again students will view the slides of Evans with the purpose of selecting one or two which they feel they can write an 100 to 200 word description of the person(s) or the environment in these photographs. Students can then view these pictures for longer periods of time to record the details of objects and elements of the background.
The teacher may ask the students to imagine what happened just prior to the taking of this picture or immediately after it was taken. Students must be encouraged to make this speculation based upon the elements in the picture not on pure conjecture. Students can also begin to write down how these photographs make them feel and why or what it is in the photograph which makes them feel this way. They can be asked to compare this feeling to an event from their own experience. Other questions which may be asked to elicit further responses are: What will the person in the picture say or do after this picture is taken? Why do you think the photographer took this picture?
The above description and these later observations may be combined in a larger written composition of approximately 500 words. An ultimate goal of this curriculum is to get students to be able to write a thousand words about a photograph!
AT THIS TIME STUDENTS WILL BEGIN READING SELECTIONS FROM AGEE’S LUNPFM ESPECIALLY SECTIONS ABOUT THE DIFFICULTY OF WRITING AND PRIVACY!!!
Spies—Observing Someone in the Neighborhood—The Difficulty of Writing/Intruding
As a homework assignment children will be asked to observe someone from their family or neighborhood and begin recording approximately 50 words a day for two weeks. The student should try to describe their physical features, their clothing, what they are doing, where they are and what is present in the area around their chosen subject. Students should allow their subjects to know that they are doing this but are not to record in their prescience but should do this writing just prior to going to sleep or immediately upon waking up or during the first few minutes of their schoolday. It must be emphasized that this is a notebook they are keeping and not a finished product. If they are having any difficulty writing during the time they are doing this recording they should write about that difficulty. They can even write the same things repeatedly until their is something more to say. During this two week period the students are to write something everyday whether they see the person or not. They should plan to do at least two or three things with this person during these weeks. On a day when they have not seen or done anything with that person they should write about them from memory. They should be encouraged to read their writing the morning after or later on in that day but not immediately after recording it. Another thing that they may do when they do not see this person is write about a favorite piece of clothing or object that this person owns. They should include in this notebook at least one description of a special event that they have done together. The person selected should not be someone who they have a photograph of.
Complement/Supplement
An additional activity could be to have the students write about an experience they had with the person who they originally wrote about earlier in this curriculum of this section. Have they seen this person or told them that they had written about them? How did it make them feel when they saw them? What did that person say when the student told them that they had written about them? They could take the photograph which they used as a source of their writing and ask that person to describe it or the events surrounding its being taken.
Faces and Facades: Masks
Students will take photographs of a family of friends in their neighborhood. They should be instructed to seek photographic environments and situations which will provide the best description about who that person(s) is and what they do. Family members should be photographed together but not necessarily for a ‘‘family portrait.” These photographs should best describe each member of the family as a member of that family, focusing on what they do in, around and for the family. Each person should be photographed with a favorite object or a special piece of clothing as well as doing their favorite activity. They should be photographed doing something for or with a family member. Photographs should be taken of the front of the person’s house, their front door, anything at all like a porch or
stoop
or a place where the family informally gathers.
As a final activity the student should choose one of these family members and spend a six hour period observing them. During that time they are to take twentyfour photographs of them and spend ten minutes of each hour writing something about doing this.
A similar activity will be performed by the students while they attend someone’s birthday party or during a family celebration of someone who they are not related to. Students will do this photographing and ten minute writing knowing that they are going to combine some of these visual and verbal notes to compose a kind of photo album/daybook which will eventually be given to that person as their birthday gift. It will not be given to them for at least three months following this event.
Bringing it All Back Home
Combining the Visual and the Verbal
At this point students will create a slide show presentation that combines the display of a selection of Evan’s photographs and a taped audio recording of selections from Agee’s text.
Students will later modify this presentation by adding their own written descriptions and impressions of Evans’s photographs.
Students will then create a combined slide-audio presentation with their own photographs and writings.
Visual Reading
Returning to the photograph described in the
DESCRIPTION
section of these activities I suggest the following interpretation:
The frame is carefully divided into two areas, an area that is a precise and accurate rendering of appearances. And one that is illusory, unreal, unperceivable by the naked eye, fantastical and imagined or perceivable only to the naked eye of the camera. The people occupy the real space. One faces out into the even more real beingspace of the photographer and viewer, the other looks deeper into the unreal and imaginative world inside the frame and these two worlds are strangely divided by the fence. Yet the twoviewers (on view) are also joined by the simple affectionate gesture of integrally divided by the fence. Yet the two-viewers (on view) are also joined by the simple affectionate gesture of intertwined hands. And lying on the surface of this real world (of the woman) and the surface of the photograph is a confused mythical image of Pegasus/Unicorn.
The number of associations can proliferate, reaching many layers of meaning. There is the dichotomy of male and female and their respective views. The fecundity of the imaginative world. The limitedness and sparseness of the real.
Behind the Mask of Mystery and Meaning
Agee thought the form of his compositor should best approximate music, because of the recurrence and the variation of themes. Others have thought that photography is more like music than it is like painting, primarily because photography, like music has to deal with time.
As a final activity students will add a musical score to the slide presentation that has already been produced. The slideaudio presentation will also be expanded to include writings no photographs could ever approximate. The photographic section will be expanded to include a series of indescribable places and objects.