guiding principles

Big Ideas

beauty • balance • mechanics • chance • time • perception • light/dark • color • space • form • matter • immateriality • identity • alterity

Essential Questions

What is beauty?

Is beauty created, discovered, implied, embodied, pursued, reflected, or rejected?

What is the relationship between aesthetics and ethics? Between beauty, balance, and justice?

Can a mechanical or digital device create art?

What can a photographed image teach us about the nature of time? ... about relinquishing our experience of the moment for the document?

What does a photograph teach us about truth and subjectivity?

What is the difference between an image of a thing and the thing itself? ... and what lies between these two?

How can we use the practice and study of photography to sharpen our critical senses?

How can we use the practice of photography to reflect upon ourselves and better understand our place in the world?

What power dynamics are implicit to the role of photographer and subject?

How have artists and photographers wrestled with the ontology of the image?

As a witness and an archive, how does photography investigate, document, and re-create the world?

Enduring Understandings

The Big Ideas and Essential Questions are intended as points of contemplation and departure for the student of photography. The answers to these questions are not simple, and perhaps the most enduring understanding would be that the pursuit of art, science, and philosophy lasts a lifetime, and that these questions are designed to stoke our curiosity and lead us into conversation with other thinkers who have also wrestled with these ideas, rather than to be wrapped up and solved with a concrete answer. If anything, photography offers new ways to engage with these essential questions: thinking through one's hands and senses and even through materials, leaving behind the primacy of language in how we access knowledge and construct meaning.

Technical Objectives

Students will learn all of the basic functions of an SLR camera-- both digital and film.

Students will learn all of the basic procedures of developing and printing black and white photographs in the darkroom.

Students will learn about composition and the elements of visual art as they apply to creating and analyzing photographic images.

Students will learn how to create their own photographs that express their ideas and aesthetics in a skillful and personally relevant way.