We were so lucky to have Terry Barrett come to FotoFika on Wednesday.
I’ve been a shoot-from-the hip kind of professor and I don’t think I can ever be any other kind. As Mark Klett says we are paid to think on our feet. Responding to the individual, to the moment, to what is on the wall and what is happening around me is how I run critiques. I’ve been proud of being able to create a space where students gradually open up, where they take bigger risks and make stronger work. Critiques where they connect with each other and me and where real sparks start to fly. Generally speaking I think this works. Or at least that’s what I’ve told myself. I know there are students who have definitely benefitted and grown from this. There are, I am sure, others who were missed or turned off. I’m hoping not too many. Since leaving the bubble of my tenured position at ASU and beginning to teach online and visiting/adjunct teaching a four other schools I’ve started to think that there may be room for self-improvement. Critiquing at MassArt was similar but slightly different from ASU, in general the vibe of an art school and the east coast gave the students more confidence in their interpretations and ideas. Harvard predictably leaned towards the conceptual and the text (they actually read the texts!) but away from the creative risk taking. They totally understood the idea “I want you to make mistakes, you need to fail to grow and make discoveries”– and we would talk about the idea, oh the pleasure in the discussion, but in actuality for many of them failing wasn’t in their DNA. Hampshire was surprisingly difficult for me, while the one-on-one and small committees were fantastic, the classes, the critiques, were quite difficult, somehow I couldn’t read the audience, I missed some signals–said some things that were, maybe taken the wrong way or were just wrong. That semester the critiques spiraled from something I looked forward to to something I dreaded. But I taught at Hampshire in the Spring of 2019 and I now see that it foreshadowed 2020. During that spring the president of Hampshire (now gone thankfully) was basically selling off the school. The students and faculty didn’t know if they would have a school to return to in the fall, the staff was being laid off throughout the semester– one could hardly imagine a worse learning situation–ha, until Spring 2020, until Fall 2020. So maybe it wasn’t me after-all.
Now I am working with my online ASU students through Zoom and through asynchronous Slack discussions and my in person Emerson students who are socially distanced, masked and unable to get up from their seats. I am trying so hard to make the most of the compromised space and time–trying as hard as possible to give them an un-compromised experience, I realize that perhaps running critiques– really at the heart of the process– during a crisis may require a bit more than shooting from the hip. This is part of why we’ve decided to dedicate several sessions to critique because its not just shooting from the hip and there is no magic bullet or formula for critiques. So I was grateful to listen to Terry (mostly listen) as he talked about his career of thinking and writing about critique and criticizing photographs.
One of the main take-aways that I got from the talk wasn’t what I thought–some kind of formula for critique– but rather a general sense of how my ego shouldn’t be the center of the discussion. Like everyone I have better days and worse days, sometimes I’m really entertaining, some days I give great words of wisdom and advice (although probably fewer than I think), the best are when I am able to facilitate a great discussion where I hardly say anything gently tipping the discussion towards one great insight by a student to another and other days, the worst, I feel I’ve thrown a wet blanket over the entire class and leave fearing some of them will hate photography and art for the rest of their lives.
Right now what I know is that I have to put more effort in during crisis, more effort to hear them and understand them from through Zoom, or in their writing or from behind the mask. I found so many ideas in Terry’s talk about how I might continue to work towards this– Most of what he said I’ve always known. But sometimes after 25 years of teaching its important to re-calibrate.
Here are my notes from Terry’s talk including my thoughts mixed with his–
Making better pictures is a limited goal.
Instead consider:
improve social discourse
make better citizens
learn to describe and interpret
encourage thought and engagement
Silence (from the artist and the professor?)
Give up power
Interactive
Slow down
Sit with discomfort
Step away from Judgement
Avoid (forbid?) the word “like”
Guide towards more thoughtful
Make them independent
More responsibility on the students
Giving up power
Silence
Discomfort is okay
Discourage discussion of intent on the part of the artist
Critique as a Noun vs a Verb
Critique vs. Criticism
Maybe they/you/we don’t need to criticize everything
Good crying–open emotional raw safe to express, overwhelmed, intense
Bad crying–humiliated, scared, overwhelmed, intense
Practical:
Use their names
Ask them questions
What do they see? what do they feel? What have they heard?
Silence, Discomfort,
Check your ego.