Now that I’ve started this thing (I abhor the word “blog”), I’m like a dog chasing a car…I may have caught it, but I don’t quite know what to do with it.

Perhaps the impulse to write has come from all the interior monologues I’ve conducted about how much my job has changed in the last five years. A bit of personal history might be in order: I first taught photography back in college, when I ran the publications darkroom at Middlebury and helped my friends learn to print. Post-college, my first job working as a photographer didn’t feel right to me as a 21-year-old with a degree in literature, and I thrashed around for a few years, taking classes, trying out ideas (including teaching and editing), and beginning to raise a family.

My first grown-up gig teaching photography was as a graduate education student–I taught U.Va. students who had gravitated toward this Education School course (“photography for teachers”) as a way to get darkroom time. It felt right to me, and my students were thriving. Within two years I had been offered a job teaching at a local high school, where one class grew to four (plus yearbook advising) in a few years. A year after my third child was born, I moved to an independent school and again “grew” a photography program from scratch (and brought the school’s yearbook into the 21st century).

As anyone who teaches in this kind of environment will testify, private school jobs are complicated and demanding. Advising; one-on-one teaching; committee work; intensely thoughtful faculty and department meetings; endless impromptu conversations with prospective and current parents; wonderfully argumentative discussions with bright, committed colleagues: it’s the closest you can come to college life without going back to school. Not a lot of time or energy is left for really thinking about photography, whether it’s one’s personal work or the rapidly evolving and expanding nature of the medium.

Thanks to the internet, I’m back in touch with many former students, lots of whom have gone on to study or work in photography; one (who went on to get her MFA) exclaimed to me “Ms. Moore-Coll, you’ve given birth to all these photographers–how does that feel?!” Well, dear, it feels great–it’s what keeps me going. But as I burrow deeply into middle age, am I becoming obsolete as a photo teacher? I know that I’ve changed and grown in my job, but I’m still devoted to teaching the basics–i.e., darkroom/black-and-white FILM photography–as a foundation for the many, many directions that the medium now takes.

Yes, we use digital cameras at our school for yearbook, but my photo students usually only study with me for three or four semesters at most, and they clearly learn a tremendous amount in that short time from the darkroom process. It’s just a different way of using the brain than pointing and clicking with Photoshop, slouched in front of a computer (as if they don’t already spend enough time there). And, perhaps most important for high school students: almost all of them LOVE it. When a 16-year-old walks out of the darkroom, squinting into a tray and counting test-strip exposures, mumbling to herself about dodging and burning, she’s engaged, she’s thinking critically, and she’s crafting something uniquely her own, using her hands and honing her instincts as well as depending on rational problem-solving. It’s a perfect combination of creative process and scientific method, with the added bonus of a product you can hold in your hands (or hang on your wall) and be proud of having crafted.

Our school is switching to a trimester calendar next year, so my task over the next few months is to devise a plan for transforming semester-long photo classes into some combination of one- and two-trimester foundation and elective offerings. I’ve bounced ideas off many students, and tomorrow I’ll meet with my visual art colleagues to begin developing a plan. What I care about most is helping kids develop both skills and ideas as photographers; whether they’ll be continuing their studies in college, preparing to work in the medium, or just using cameras to document their personal lives, there has to be some kind of common ground I can offer them, something that won’t become obsolete no matter how digital the world becomes. I’m excited to delve into this…and I hope to hear ideas from other photographers.

Advertisement