Learning Photography:
Lessons in the Language of Visual Literacy
Bryan Cheney's enduring challenges take a new form in 2008.

Learning photography at Milton has shifted from the realm of film and darkroom to the technology of the charged couple device and digital software. The medium has changed, but the message to the students has not: rediscover the experience of seeing, gain fluency in the language of the visual image, and learn the craft of writing with the pencil of light.

A project that has always been essential in my teaching of photography is that of making a composite or manipulated image, referencing the exceptional work of photographers such as Jerry Uelsmann, as well as such surrealist painters as Salvador Dalí and René Magritte. Working in the darkroom with sandwiching negatives; exposing images in sequence; masking, blending, or painting developer, students confront a whole new set of technical and conceptual challenges. In the process, and the processes, they learn just how “plastic,” and thereby how truly creative, a medium photography can be.

Whether created with the digital tools of Adobe Photoshop or the traditional wet darkroom techniques, composite images require a creative process much like the composition of a poem: the collection and rearrangement of normally separate elements into a new order as a vehicle of expression—original, unique, and potentially free of the necessity to represent experienced reality directly. Imagination gains an outlet, finds a voice, can be made visible on a page.

In learning to write, we learn to distinguish between fiction and nonfiction, prose and poetry. In learning to paint and draw, we learn to distinguish between observation and imagination, realism and abstraction. In photography, the instantaneous creation of an image, the “taking” of a picture, often leads to the narrowing of the otherwise potentially creative process of “making” an image. This traps us in the comparable realms of prose nonfiction and observational realism.

To write a poem or paint from imagination, we must draw upon resources of the mind and spirit that challenge our powers of perception as well as the control of the language—verbal or visual. This challenge becomes the artist’s opportunity to grow, to discover new horizons of self and world. That same opportunity has always been inherently available in the medium of photography—indeed it has actually created great tension between photographers and traditional artists throughout the history of photography. The advent of digital image technology has facilitated the chance to rearrange and reshape the elements of a picture, to build rather than simply capture, to express rather than simply communicate.

The tools of digital software such as Adobe Photoshop provide the interested and inspired artist—and student—with the flexibility of creative choice that a writer takes for granted in arranging words and phrases, or that a visual artist in traditional media assumes in exercising “artistic license” about what and how to paint or sculpt.

Assembling a composite image in Photoshop requires a perception of the world in far greater detail and sophistication than seems, at first, necessary in straight photography. The artist must see the object not only for what it is, or represents, but also for the quality of light, the direction of shadow, the scale in juxtaposition, the quality of focus and edge. To make a new—imagined—reality that is both convincing and comprehensible (like any good piece of writing) also requires a fluency in control of the respective language of the artist. This requirement is arguably greater than that required for straight, accurate description of observational reality; therefore, the challenge to create a composite image becomes a fantastic teaching tool.

To build a composite image also requires a definition of intent: to what end are the creative choices made? What is the message that the medium must be shaped to serve? This is not only a creative challenge in the nature of the assignment, but it becomes an effective, if not essential, teaching tool for exemplifying the importance of the creative choices, whether intentional or accidental, in the “making” of any straight photograph that is “taken.”

To “take a picture” is to choose from the continuum of time and the array of objective three-dimensional reality, to choose a moment, a point of view, and a collection of two-dimensional representations bound by the borders of a fixed frame—all with the intent to communicate an observation or an interpretation that matters. It is, at its best, a process that requires understanding of self, world and language, no matter how simple the goal. The challenge to “make” a composite image, with no limit to the creative choices available, enlarges the range of opportunities for discovery, and thereby the opportunities for the growth of the eye, the mind, and the spirit of the student.

Bryan Cheney
Visual Arts Department

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