How teaching needs to consider the world our young people live in

By Evan Wood, Research Further Scholar.

In 1826, a mirky photograph taken through the window at La Gras by Nicèphore Nièpce presented to the world a new technology, a new way of thinking and a new way of seeing. Over the following 100 years, photography would become more ubiquitous as photographic technology became more accessible, cheaper and portable. The world became something to go out into and record. The world was being seen rather than painted and drawn.

Part of this philosophical visual transformation asked what role painting would have. The pictorial and literal records of monarchs, events, landscapes usually undertaken through paint, was now redundant as photography transcribed a literal event quicker, accurately and seen as being from life, a thing of ‘truth’. The famous painter Paul Delaroche announced after seeing a photograph in 1840 that “from today, painting is dead”. What photography did was seemingly open up a record of the literal. As a result, artists went inward, exploring new philosophical and psychological concepts that required vision to conceptualise. Abstract Expressionism, a response to the cultural upheaval and human tragedy of World War 2, took the feeling of something and tried to paint it. It attempted to make the abstract tangible and gave significance to the things we can’t see but feel. Abstraction, feeling and the innersole was mainstream, undeniable and powerful.

A similar process is happening today to photography. When digital photography emerged, it transformed how the photograph was made, but crucially questioned the supposed authenticity of what photography offered. Digital technology opened up a new genre as editing photographs became easier and brought in new questions about authenticity, which first emerged through Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical reproduction (1940). In this, Benjamin asked the crucial question of which photograph, when one negative can produce multiple images, presents a ‘truth’.

His questions seem more pertinent today, as digital image-making, and crucially the intent of its use on social media, can be made by AI, visually accurate, made in seconds and built into software packages used throughout education. As teachers, it raises interesting creative questions about what we want to teach in our classrooms. These questions are not really about truth, as a painting isn’t truth, nor is a photograph. What these questions are, are attempts to unravel a notion of authenticity. What is real in politics in a social media space? Is this what I have to look like? Are ‘followers’ legitimate extensions of an authentic lived experience?

Our young people exist in a space where the philosophical questions mentioned above are now at the forefront of their lived experience. What are the truths that they can hold on to as they grow up in an unregulated digital landscape, where images, films, accounts of events can all be made up? Our young people are impressionable, they don’t want to work the way their family had to, can’t afford to think about buying a house and engage with hyper sexualised identities that aren’t real on social media. I scratch the surface of what they see. If the concept of truth was abandoned and the language of something authentic invested in, perhaps we would create a space where intent and context became the crucial philosophical space our young people could inhabit.

As a photographer that uses the darkroom, I enjoy the speed and convenience digital photography brings to my practice, but I also enjoy the skills and physicality of the darkroom picture. I enjoy the romance of a photon traveling through a lens, leaving an imprint on a silver halide plate, creating a reversal of what’s been photographed, only to go into the dark and emerge with a picture. This process is laboursome, but physical. I have to understand fractions, time, size, temperature, volume, millilitres. I have to be able to read, order, prioritise. All these skills lead to an important investment into the thing I make. The picture is an organised projection of ideas and technology, turned into something i believe to be important. It encourages me to be critical, question my intent because my time is invested into it.

Most importantly, I place it in front of others to connect. I go to all this effort to connect with my friends and peers. My feeling is each layer of effort is about building integrity, an enquiry into something I want to understand, developing a visual language, that when shared helps me to understand myself and the environment around me. Photographic practice, painting sculpture are all methods to construct the world we want to live in. The critical, questioning educational space is a crucial means to help develop the outcomes into a language.