This year sees me teaching a subject I haven't taught for several years. It is both an easy subject and a hard subject to teach. At my work we call it Folio. It is a subject designed to help students develop conceptual and technical skills in creating a body of work that they may use to either gain employment, or go to further studies. It also exposes them to many more photographers than they would normally see, or look at, and gives them an opportunity to learn to articulate about photographs beyond: "I like this because it worked" or "I took this because it looked beautiful".
At one level this is an incredibly liberating experience it can allow me to free associate and talk at length about what I think photography is and isn't, what is good about it and what I dislike, where I've seen it come from and where I see it going to.
It also relies heavily on the experience, for some of the time anyway, being a 2 way street.
All in all it's going to be a good experience, challenging but good nonetheless. This year I'm expecting folio to impact on what I write and how often I write here, so readers please forgive me if I go off on a tirade or start speaking in jargon. After all what does constitute a good photograph, is there such a thing as a bad photograph, is it important to pay attention to the kinds of details that have long been important in photography like good craft, how important is the substance behind a photograph, should a good photograph hide more than it reveals?
These are some of the questions I hope to encourage my students to contemplate and try and articulate in language and their photographs.
