Breathing through the crisis
The new term has begun and we're deep into the third week of classes at both NYU and the International Center for Photography. As usual I'm dwelling on questions of learning and teaching. How do I help you become more of the photographer you already are? This is the question that keeps me up at night, that's for sure. One of the unspoken assumptions of photography is that the world is photographable. We start from here and move forward, as if making pictures in this way was not only desirable—our goal—but also doable. I'm not so sure anymore. It might be that we have to investigate this underlying assumption. What do we do when we make pictures with photography? What do we say about ourselves? About our world? About what we know, or want to know? What does the act of pointing a camera say about what we love, and what we want to forget? A student wrote to me in crisis: the computer, the arbitrary materiality of the apparatus, was confounding her, making her doubt her abi...