Teaching high-school photography is an ambiguous business sometimes; you find yourself wondering why you do what you do, and what the kids get out of it. My beginning Foundations classes (which last two trimesters) are strictly based on black-and-white photography; we shoot Tri-X or HP-5, and the students spend a lot of time in the darkroom. I believe it’s the best way to build a visceral understanding of light-sensitive materials and about making images through the lens. It’s an arts class, but do I consider myself an artist? Not usually. Many of my students are, but many aren’t artists either. We make images for so many reasons. My own program emphasizes story-telling (or at least, that’s what I try to do) and I encourage my students to document their interests and their lives. And in the soon-to-be-yearlong class called Visual Documentary, they can work with any medium: digital, video, audio, print, or good old black-and-white darkroom photography. I don’t set a lot of limits on what they can document, as the goal should be for them to generate ideas that come from their own experience. When they find the right subject, the results can be extraordinary. Some of their works-in-progress are posted on our class blog, PoMoViDo (http://pomovido.blogspot.com/), short for “Post Modern Visual Documentary” (a title chosen by a charter class member with a sense of humor). The class has just begun to finish their first projects, and I hope new work will be posted soon.
As for me…my last couple of years have involved documenting my mom’s illness and my family home in West Virginia. When Mom died in September 2010, one of my tasks was to inventory the contents of the pantry and kitchen, a process I found both absorbing and healing. Over the course of a couple of days, I washed, counted, listed, and photographed hundreds of pieces of glass, silver, and china. Now it’s April, almost exactly six months since the day that Mom died, and the house my parents lived in for 46 years is about to change hands. We’ll be clearing out the last of the furnishings over the next couple of weeks in preparation for a new family and a much-longed-for new life for our house. I’ve posted about the house in the past (http://jmoorecoll.wordpress.com/2008/06/06/silence-the-pianos/). It’s been quietly eerie to watch the house fade, as though slowly bleached, over these last six months; the paintings, books, and furniture are slowly being removed, but it still looks like somebody’s house. In a few weeks, it’ll be an empty shell, ready for a new occupant. The pictures posted below are of the small things–not the big furniture or paintings, not what you see when you walk in the door, but the collected objects that gave the place its quirky character and its sense of home. I’m so grateful that I have these images that will let me hang on to the house I grew up in, now that it’s entering its next chapter. ‘Bye, house.
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“Time it was, and what a time it was–
It was a time of innocence, a time of confidences.
Long ago, it must be–I have a photograph.
Preserve your memories; they’re all that’s left you.”
–Bookends Theme, Simon and Garfunkel
