James P. Brochin
This is a unit about photographs. In what follows, I will be describing certain key images.
As Eugene Smith so beautifully says, his goal was to instill in the viewer of his war photographs, a "compassionate horror." My goal in teaching this unit is the same.
Reality is not a video game. Students need to know about war, and they need to know about the human condition. War photography is a uniquely powerful form of photography, and a uniquely effective way to get high school students to respond to and describe the human condition.
Photography has been seen to carry a "burden of truth that no other medium possessed (Orvell, p. 61). Such phrases as "a picture is worth a thousand words" and "seeing is believing" express the undeniability of photography. Photography, being relatively new among the expressive arts, is in its own class. Photography is expected to be an accurately representation of what is really there. War photography in particular calls on the objective truth telling nature of photography. Whether the image is created by a heavy box camera or by an SLR, photography is assumed to express the truth about the nature of war making.
Students can and do become bored with the study of war history. War history can be facts upon facts, dates, battles, and strategy. I have had many students ask me, "Why do we always have to study wars?" I believe that the study of war presents many "teachable moments," perhaps more than any other topic in history. Why? Because the study of war is the study of the human condition: power, pride, idealism, technological advance, loyalty, courage, cruelty, sorrow, revenge, racism, atrocities, heroism, injury, death, sickness, pity. War photography, through it clear eyed and often-dramatic depiction of the reality of war, presents a "way in" to universal themes that is accessible and engaging for high school students.
In viewing all photographs in this unit, students will first be expected to respond to the images in silence. Silence is both a way for students to contact their visceral/emotional responses and itself an appropriate response to many of the images we will be viewing, allowing them to begin to form questions about the image: When was it taken? Under what circumstances? How did the photographer choose that moment to take the picture? Did the photographer know the subjects? There are too many possible questions to list here; many I will not have anticipated. This unit will be student-centered. In other words, there will be little "lecturing," and whatever content is required about, for example, technological changes in photography, will be given to students as homework. Thus, the bulk of class time will be centered on the images themselves.
The overall "narrative arc" of the unit will be to trace war photography from its use as propaganda, to its realistic depiction of violence, to its powerful ability instill outrage, grief and empathy its viewers. I want students to make the transition in their viewing from audience to witness.
