Sandra K. Friday
To meet the challenge of how to begin a unit on photographs, some taken half a century ago, I will ask students to bring in photos of themselves, of social gatherings, and photos taken of them in their homes; some have children of their own, so I will encourage them to bring in photos of themselves with their children. From these, I will select a few to copy onto transparencies to show the class on the overhead projector. I might add to this a transparency of a teenager dancing while listening to an Ipod, or someone taking a picture of him- or herself or others with a cell phone, or someone savoring (if such a thing is possible) a burger at a fast food restaurant. Because students love looking at photos of themselves and their peers, we will start to practice our
way of looking
through the lens
skills with these familiar, contemporary photos. This is one of the strategies for "backing my students in" to learning new skills.
Using a couple of these photos, I will model this process with the help of my students, and then after practicing it on photos of themselves and their contemporaries, they will move one step beyond themselves and practice the process on a September 19, 2005
Newsweek
photo (p. 30 - 31) from hurricane Katrina of an African American father clutching his children on a concrete bridge, waiting to be rescued by helicopters overhead; and then on a photo in an advertisement, in the same issue (opposite p. 40), of a Euro-American father in a lawn chair, cuddling his three little girls in matching dresses, in a leafy suburban backyard, waiting, perhaps, for pork ribs to finish cooking on the grill. These photos will also set the stage for questions about discrimination and disenfranchisement that are inevitable when viewing these two real-life photographs and many of Parks' photos from the 1940's through the 1960's.
