Out of many visual materials available for use in the classroom, I chose photographs because they are, perhaps, less confusing than other forms and most straightforward in terms of meaning. However, Susan Sontag claims that even though photographs "capture reality," they are still an "interpretation of the world" around us: "Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are."
21
This seems to sound rational; but the quality of the interpretation of a photograph does depend on the background knowledge and previous personal experience of the one who interprets it. Photographs seem to penetrate, if not all, then most spheres of human existence, starting from their habitual uses such as family and tourist pictures, including their involvement in the bureaucratic ways of managing society, and ending with the public display of photojournalistic products about some political, cultural, or social event.
22
Since photography is such a wide-spread phenomenon in our lives, our reading of photographs becomes an important skill.
It seems that very often we overlook the complex nature of photographs and neglect the contextual knowledge that is necessary in order to understand them. Walker and Chaplin write:
-
Images - particularly photographs - are thought to be easier to assimilate and to be more universal than words in one of humanity's six thousand languages. [...]but it does not automatically follow that just because people can see an image they can understand its meaning. This is because codes, conventions and symbols are used in the making of visual artefacts which may not be familiar to the viewers, and because viewers may lack the contextual - cultural and historical - knowledge that is generally required before the subject and content of images can be grasped.
23
In the process of teaching the unit, I appeal to students' "contextual knowledge," and, to avoid different degrees of this knowledge, I build it through short readings in three disciplines - language arts, social studies, and science. Through explicit discussions of readings, students construct and activate their background knowledge before they begin working with photographs.
During the teaching of the unit, I raise the issue of subjectivity in photography: when examining photographs, one should take into consideration that a documentary photograph, in spite of its mission to reflect an objective reality, is, according to Craig Denton, "a form of personal expression." He justly notices that documentarians "are charged with accurately representing what is there with a minimum of personal interference. Yet the documentarian is a person with an ego and is perceived as being a creator, so the creation of personal vision and artistic statement are part of the motivation and reason for creating a documentary."
24
I encourage students to consider factors that cause a photographer to take a particular photograph, starting from a broad statement that a photograph records "an Event: something worth seeing - and therefore worth photographing,"
25
and ending with detailed assumptions about a photographer's personal taste and intentions, and his or her hope to reinforce our moral position about a subject.
Pondering the reasons for taking a particular photograph is in a way similar to drawing conclusions about the author's purpose for choosing a genre or including or omitting specific details in a written work - one of the Reading Comprehension test objectives pursued in the preparation for taking Connecticut Mastery Tests. I believe that paying attention to this aspect of working with a photograph is appropriate because it promotes students' critical thinking skills, which are applicable to many other academic areas.