“Photographs
can be an engine of teaching. They can pose as an intermediary between
a teacher's voice and a student's voice”. Wendy Ewald
Nii
Obodai, a photographer and educator, moderated a complex field
addressing the role of photography in education. Obodai, who is
currently developing a new school, in Africa—Nuku meaning wonderful
surprise—spoke candidly that there is currently not enough critical
thinking, creativity and inclusion of postcolonial photography in
Africa.
“I am teaching kids to be more participatory, photography has given me the skills to do that,” he said.
Obodai
continued by saying that it is the failure of the education system,
that has not addressed the complexities of Africa. A new education
system has some hope in addressing existing black and white
stereotypes. Visual education is able to make reality a lot more
tangible than just facts, figures and graphs. Obodai is dedicated to
teaching people and bringing the learning experience to who they are,
through the medium of photography.
Eric Gottesman (USA) a
photographer and researcher, posed the question: “Rather than arguing
whether digital itself is good or bad, we can think about visual
listening, in the sense of who gets to speak and how does that affect
what we see in the world?” We can see photography as indexing reality
so that we can make sense of that reality. Gottesman has been doing
photography-based research projects in Ethiopia since 1999 to 2012.
Previous
to his field-work, he had a lot of images in mind of what he would find
there. Seeing pictures of un-named African subjects often engulfed in
famine and war, he felt even more alienated by seeing the photographs
than he did before. By exploring the realm of studio photography and
practice in Ethiopia, he was able to get a much more intimate view:
“This kind of studio photography says a lot more complex story than any
of the famine images that were circulating at the time.”
This
became part of the project of finding meaning beyond the photograph, its
social life. The studios were being co-opted and re-appropriated by
people who visited these studios and so there was a whole participatory
element to the studio photography that had been absent with
photojournalism. The social life of photographs had been awakened and
Gottesman had become a part of it.
By using participation
observation, stepping in front of the camera and becoming the subject
himself, there was a deconstruction of the power relations of the images
he was taking. He became the subject and the Ethiopians became the
ones looking at him in their environment, so he was becoming part of
their social fabric and their ways of making meaning of the world around
them. There was a participatory dialogue where both subject and
image-maker became interchangeable, making the educative process more
participatory.
Wendy Ewald (USA) has collaborated on many photo
literacy projects that deconstruct a singular authorship and instead
facilitates multiple perspectives in their reading through participatory
teaching and exhibition practices. Giving illustrative examples of
teachers that she has collaborated with in Tanzania, she spoke openly of
how they wanted pictures in their classrooms, as visual aids so that
they could include the reading of images into their curriculum
practice. The final project accumulated in a series of ten posters.
“I went to visit a teachers college so that they could design their visual aids,” she explained.
“The
teachers made up the questions that led them to read what makes a
photograph interesting. By all of us working together we decided what
these pictures are and collaboratively created a design for each of
these pictures.”
There is a mandate in Tanzania that the
classroom should be participatory. Photography became the intermediary
between a teacher’s voice and a student’s voice which can be very
empowering when there are challenging topics such as HIV and AIDS that
must cover a whole lesson.
“The idea is actually to just follow things and let them lead you, rather than you directing it too much,” added Ewald.
“The
Pictures Woke People Up” is a collaborative project between Gottesman
and Ewald with the indigenous Innu people of Labrador between 2007 and
2012. The project explores preservation, repatriation and the emerging
practices of social collaboration. Innu people had been placed on a
reservation that had arguably created social problems. One of the first
things that Gottesman and Ewald did was to go onto the reservation and
show pictures of the community that Ewald had first taken in 1969.
These were then collected into an archive and exhibited in 2007.
They
had a participatory way of how to represent these pictures. The people
in the community got people to vote. By voting about the actual
pictures that they wanted to show, they co-curated the actual exhibition
themselves. Banners of the exhibition, placed in public spaces marked
what was going on and they had a week of discussions. The community had
felt that they needed to be heard and finally they had a platform in
which they could speak out.
A lot people in the community
wanted an archive, so Gottesman and Ewald started posting photographs to
Facebook. There were many comments about photographs of people that
they recognized. There was a photo of a shaman; the comments that were
posted were very different from what had been in the museum. The
caption in the museum had just simply described the name of the shaman
and his role. On Facebook, however, the Innu community who had known
him were posting all sorts of personal amusing anecdotes such as, “He
was such a player” “This guy was really magical and powerful.” To
re-include their perspectives that had previously been excluded, Ewald
and Gottesman printed out these photographs with the Facebook comments
and exhibited them in the gallery, allowing multiple perspectives to
flood into the exhibition space.
Enrico Bossan (Italy), the
Editor of Colors magazine, took the floor and asked rhetorically who
checks their social networks first thing in the morning and who,
alternatively, checks the newspapers? There has been a great shift in
whom people are willing to trust in the media. Citizen journalism has
actually become a hugely important aspect of our social fabric and our
way of understanding our world. We are no longer, as we were in the
past, bound whole Kodak ownership. It seems we are only just beginning
to understand the importance of this shift. Can mobile phones be this
new device for sharing and understanding the world? Bossan poses this
question as an important one.
His visual understanding of the
world is that at an apex of “Social meets art, art meets social.” He
emphasized that being a photographer is not about only developing a
technical skill, nor it is just about the pleasure of the image. Visual
literacy is about deciding what is important to be documented and how
it can be documented.
Giving examples of young photographers that have collaborated with him through Fabrica, he spoke sincerely of how these photographers had touched him with their courage in subject matter, honesty of view-point and thoughtful, artistic composition. This is something that has become very important to him in the way in which we understand the whole participatory practices of photography.
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