I know nothing about how to teach photography. I’ve never studied photography and have never read much about how to take photos–whether in a garden or anywhere. I’ve looked at thousands of garden photographs in books in magazines. I have perhaps 3,000 of my own photos on the garden website, photos dating back ten years, but my modus operandi is point and shoot ‘em. Once the digital photos have been transferred to my flashdrive, I do some simple editing: cropping out stuff I don’t want and occasionally adjusting the “exposure”–usually to darken the images. But I really don’t know what I’m doing.
As I said before, I know nothing about photography pedagogy. But while pulling up sedge and crabgrass (and purslane, thousands of purslane), I do wonder how one might help students with cameras in their hands productively spend a few hours in a garden learning something about something. I’m just not sure what the “something” should be. Is the goal to produce beautiful photos of flowers–or of some animals who like to hang out with these flowers? Is the goal to learn about the flowers and their environment? Is the goal to learn about cameras? Or about how to take “good” (whatever that may mean) photos, regardless of the subject? Perhaps for some/many/most of these students, they are taking the course in order to obtain a college credit and graduate from Coe. Perhaps some are serious painting/sculpture/ceramics students who want to learn about another art form? Perhaps one or two students are actually is interested in gardens and wondering what happens in a garden?
I wonder if it’s a good idea the students initially enter the garden with cameras in their hands. Is it possible that it would have been more useful if they had arrived with paper and pencil and spent 30 minutes listing or describing what they see–and hear and smell and touch? Perhaps before looking at this world with a camera, it would make sense to begin by observing without the assistance of any technology. Or perhaps a different technology. I’m reminded of the College for Kids art classes that visit the garden in the summer. Each student chooses one flower and for two 30-minute sessions draws their flower using a limited palette of chalks. I would bet that when they are finished with their drawing, many of them have learned something about their flower. They know something about its color and shape and how it moves in the breeze.
Today’s photographers were in the garden for about 45 minutes. I wonder what they learned. Did they talk in class or with each other about what they discovered? Is it important that they converse and create a community of photographers, or is it best to let each photographer go their own way. If they were talking with each, I wonder if any of them would admit being surprised by what they encountered. Robert Frost reminds us, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” Does that also apply to photographers?
In 1993, we were living in London, and on a beautiful spring day my son and I took the train to Oxford. We proceeded to the studio of Kata Havas, one of the world’s most eminent string teachers. My son was never going to be a great violinist, but one can’t pass up the opportunity to work with such a remarkable teacher. My son and I assumed Ms. Havas would ask him to play, but in that first lesson he didn’t play a note. She spent most of the lesson helping him think about how to hold this wooden instrument. As I was digging up crabgrass, I thought about how I was holding the small root knife I use for leveraging the crabgrass out of the turf-- without damaging the other grasses. And I thought about the students moving through the garden. Does it make a difference how they hold their cameras?
I assume all the cameras in the garden today were digital. Does anyone use film anymore? For an unskilled amateur such as myself, the digital camera is a godsend. I take dozens and dozens of photos, trusting that a decent percentage will be in focus and the lighting will be okay and the flowers will be sufficiently attractive so that visitors to the garden’s website will think the photos are okay. But for a class studying photography, I wonder how limits might inspire insight. What would happen if the instructor could control the camera’s software so each student would be limited to five photographs in 45 minutes. One photo every 9 minutes. Or perhaps no photos for the first 40 minutes, and then the software would permit five photos in the final five minutes. How would that affect how the students see the garden? Only one time have I watched a professional photographer taking photos in the Alumni House Garden. Even though he was using a digital camera, he moved slowly, meticulously arranging each photo. He worked with a tripod and would spend several minutes carefully determining the placement of the camera and the adjustments in the camera’s settings.
Twelve years ago I was teaching a course at the college’s Wilderness Field Station in northern Minnesota. The core of our class sessions involved traveling by canoe in or near the Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness Area. One of the students in the class was legally blind, and I found it intriguing that he was a photography major. His photographs were invaluable aids to his education because they enabled him to see what the rest of us could see with our own eyes--in my case aided by a pair of glasses. I often think of that issue with my own photographs. As I’m editing the photos, I come upon unsuspected details, forms, connections. Last summer I took several photographs of peony leaves. As I was editing the photos, I discovered among the leaves a large, brown, well-camouflaged praying mantis in perfect focus.