considering pictures | sean justice > open journal

Bright day. Summer. Waking up again.

Harbor, New York [light version](3 breaths) 2011 , originally uploaded by seanjustice . from the Breathing Pictures project. Also, there is a code-animated version of this that plays in a browser (it loads into a loop automatically on open; a modern browser and fast processor is needed or else it blocks up....sorry!)

© 2011 Doyeon Kim A question we keep coming back to: how do we balance skill-learning and skill-teaching within the multifaceted conversation about ideas, history, and practice that makes up art education? If you're studying photography, design, new media, or art in any of a dozen guises, this question is at the core of what you're doing — whether you explicitly ask it or not (because the folks who run your course have asked and answered it for you). And if you're teaching photography, design, etc., it's even more critical — because your answer affects, de facto , the lives of everyone who studies with you. There are several ways to divide this up, and many different rationales for arguing this side or that side, but the equation basically comes down to two options: either skill is more important than history and theory, or vice versa. And perhaps a third option — oops, almost forgot — skill, history, and theory might be equally important. Abandoned © 2011 Yar

...so many amazing conversations this week...my head is spinning... These pictures and essays and websites and code poems...all of it. Your work inspires me. I am reading Maxine Greene and thinking about being an artist educator within the framework she illuminates. We may have reached a moment in our history when teaching and learning, if they are to happen meaningfully, must happen on the verge. Confronting a void, confronting nothingness, we may be able to empower the young to create and re-create a common world—and, in cherishing it, in renewing, discover what it signifies to be free. ( Dialectic of Freedom , p. 23) The common space emerges from our conversation and I am transported to the edge of something I don't know how to describe. I'm on the verge. I am the young and your work is the teacher; in class and at the coffee shop I learn again and again that mark making matters (whether with a camera, a crayon, a line of text or a string of code on a computer), an

Surplus of Achievement a photo by seanjustice on Flickr. Is there something this is for -- rather than what it simply is -- this relentless rush towards more and more, this accumulation, this surplus of achievement? Everyday pictures mark our individual paths. The process reminds us that work comes from work, inspiration from doing, and reward from waking up and doing it again. Breathe in, breathe out. My friend Tony is on a journey to mark the days, each day, with a new picture. Can you chart it? It's a Hotel by AMRosario