culturehall as resource in arts education

Besides culturehall providing artists with a online space to display and promote their work, and the arts community a place to discover this work, David Andrew Frey and I envision the site increasingly utilized as a resource in arts education. We hope it will make a useful tool for educators to present contemporary artwork to students and to inspire written or visual assignments.

I experimented with the Digital Photo I class that I am currently teaching at William Paterson University by demonstrating how the site functions, as well as giving students a writing assignment based on work on the site. Since the class is examining portraiture and shooting portraits in a series of assignments this month, I asked them to write a paper based on a culturehall portfolio that contains photographic images of human subjects.

The photographers whose portfolios my students wrote about include: Dina Kantor, Mara Bodis-Wollner, Paolo Morales, Millee Tibbs, Heather Musto, Tiana Markova-Gold and Ayala Gazit.

Culturehall Assignment: Photographing the Human Subject

Please visit culturehall, an online resource for contemporary art. Use the browse link at the top of the homepage to locate the browse page. You can browse all works or be more specific in your search by browsing by genre or medium.

Locate a portfolio of photographic work including images of human subjects that are of interest to you. You might choose any of these genres of work: street photography, documentary photography of a single subject or a group of subjects, studio portraits, staged portraits, etc.

Please write a one-page paper addressing these questions:

Who is the subject, or who are the subjects, of the photograph or series of photographs?
What is the photographer’s relationship to the subject(s) as you perceive it?
How is the photographer using light? (Natural? Available? Flash? Studio?)
How is the photographer framing the subject(s)?
What mood does the photographer capture?
Does the work have any political content such as issues of race, class or gender?

Prepare to present your paper to the class along with a link to the selected portfolio that we will view as a group.

Faculty Exhibition

Roof Top Wedding
copyright Robin Schwartz

I started a new position this fall teaching photography at William Paterson University, which means I am making a trek on a bus from Port Authority twice a week to a green and lush campus in northern New Jersey. Full-time faculty member, Robin Schwartz, and I are teaching concurrent intro digital photo courses - sharing notes and transitioning the photo program into the digital era.

Robin and I are also both currently exhibiting photographs in the annual faculty exhibition in the Ben Shahn Court Gallery on campus. I first became familiar with Robin's work when she and Elinor Carucci gave presentations as featured artists in a panel discussion about Women in Photography led by founders, Cara Phillips and Amy Elkins, last fall at Aperture. Robin's highly imaginative and eccentric images depict her daughter, Amelia, interacting with exotic animals such as kangaroos, elephants, hairless dogs and cats, and various primates. Robin takes her "circus family" on tour of the country to find these strange creatures - recently, a trip to Texas in the heavy August heat to rendezvous with some monkeys. Her third monograph, Amelia's World, was published in 2008 by Aperture, and some of her images from this series were included in the newly released photo book, Hijaked: Volume One, which incorporates work by contemporary Australian and American photographers.

I had the pleasure of meeting the star of the photos a few weeks ago, and Amelia is as charming and magical in person as she appears in her animal kingdom. She showed me a small turtle shell and a lifeless mouse that she had discovered on one of their journeys, and I gather that there are more than a few living creatures at their home in Hoboken.

Faculty Exhibition
Ben Shahn Court Gallery
William Paterson University
Wayne, NJ

September 14 - October 16