Learning and Unlearning Photography

In 1961, Aperture magazine heralded “the workshop idea in photography” as a locus of emerging ideas in visual education. There, Minor White sketched an ideal structured around intimate situations and interpersonal relationships, fueled by the recognition that teachers might learn from and alongside their students. Recent projects and histories have celebrated the proliferation of such models, from the Kamoinge Workshop to the Feminist Photography Ovulars, but also their seeming antitheses—above all the founding of Society for Photographic Education and the widespread professionalization of photographic instruction. Along this spectrum from informal to formal instruction, the sites, mechanisms and objectives of photographic teaching and learning can be hard to keep separate. During the 1960s, for example, White was cautious in disclosing that his private workshops were “more periods of awakening than photography,” but by the 1970s such awakening was the public face of his university teaching. The subsequent decades might be framed by Allan Sekula’s certainty that “school is a factory” alongside Carmen Winant’s hope that photography might yet “teach us how to live.”

This panel examines photographic education (and un-education) as a nexus for larger questions about teaching and learning, seeking to juxtapose the formal with the informal, the institutional with the extra- or anti-institutional, the problem of how to learn photography with the question of what else one might learn through photography. Contributions from all fields/practices, and concerning all geographic regions and modern/contemporary moments, are welcome.