Relevance, Reminiscence, and Teaching Smart People

When I left the freelance world and took a job as a catalog photographer at Filenes in 1995, I made a sign for the top of my computer cart that said “Just an analog guy trapped in a digital world”. It stayed there until a bright August day 11 years later when the merger with Macy’s shut the place down forever. My sign started out as a smug statement of defiance and skepticism toward the intrusion of cold, hard digital precision to what had always been, for me at least, a soft and wonderfully quirky craft.

But by the time I flicked off the studio lights that last day, my feelings about digital photography had changed completely and irrevocably. Filenes’ parent company had been an early adopter of high-end digital photography and had equipped our studio with state-of-the-art gear and first class imaging support. Even so, most of our photographers and designers seemed to be unwilling or unable to overcome the inertia resulting from years of working with film (and I definitely included myself among them, at least at the beginning). We were shooting digitally the way we had shot with film, and what we did often seemed pretty crazy and ass-backwards as a result. Seeing that, and seeing how much of the rest of the photographic industry was finding new ways of doing the same old stuff better, I challenged myself to fully embrace and even champion “digital thinking”, often to the consternation of many of my colleagues. I just couldn’t understand why everybody else wouldn’t be itching to take the dive with me. But never one to doubt the righteousness of my position in the face of overwhelming lack of popular agreement, I hung tight and managed to drag anyone working with photography at Filenes kicking and screaming into the present. The advisory “Grow or Die” never seemed more prescient than it did among the ranks of photographers and other creative professionals in the 1990s. Reluctantly or not, we all grew, but inevitably, Filenes died.

Then I started teaching, and I found myself standing at the front of classrooms packed to the rafters with smart people. Doctors, lawyers, authors, Harvard and MIT professors, software engineers, web developers, even a “user experience designer”; you name it and they came to my workshops. But regardless of their backgrounds, every one of my students loved photography and the majority of them were way more digital-savvy than me. I was faced with the awkward challenge of teaching technology to people who, in many cases, wound up explaining it better right back to me.

At Filenes, our problem was not proactively updating the skills that some of us had spent a long time acquiring, partially out of laziness, partially out of fear of the steep new learning curve, but mostly because the nature of the work simply didn’t require it. There was no directive from senior management to “be more digital”; in fact, there was moderate opposition to it. I eventually changed because I wanted to remain intellectually and creatively challenged in an otherwise numbingly routine environment and, frankly, because I felt I owed it to myself to remain relevant as a commercial photographer.

But the teaching thing is different. First at NESOP and now at CDIA, I’ve been very surprised to learn that most of my students, regardless of age, know very little about film photography at all. Their exposure to the medium is entirely through digital cameras and computers, the result of which seems to be equating photography with hardware and software instead of with images and ideas.

So what do I do? I teach them photography. Photography the way I love it and learned it, but with digital cameras and computers instead of film and darkrooms. Photography that is primarily about pictures, not pixels. For every lecture about bit depth and color management there is an assignment to make photographs that illustrate how the students think and feel. For every Photoshop video tutorial by Scott Kelby and Jeff Schewe, there is a slide show about Duane Michals and Robert Frank. Old school, maybe, but I try to remember that even old schools eventually wind up with shiny new wings, and the good teachers are the ones who do their best to stay relevant.