Author, Teaching Photography, Tools for the Imaging Educator	September 2006
	…as a teacher it isn’t just giving the great assignment. It’s understanding how to make that assignment lead to the next assignment. It is understanding how one assignment relates to the last assignment. It is how you use that assignment to get people to go and find out about other things we may not even be capable of teaching them. It stimulates them to go on.

I’ve read that you have a Bachelors and a Masters of Arts from Purdue University.

Yes.

And you earned a doctorate from the University of Cincinnati, centering on the Psychology of Educational Spaces. What does that mean?

My dissertation was on the design of educational spaces; the title of it was Working within the Open Space. It was centered on open space education, but it was really about how educational spaces work. In other words, what the organization of a classroom has to do with education.

Do you mean physically?

Psychologically and physically. In the old days, classrooms were set up with the blackboard in the front of the classroom and the windows to the left side. This was done because everyone had to be right-handed. The light would come from the left side of the student, so when they were writing their hand was not casting a shadow on the paper as they wrote. That was the structure of education pre-electric lights. There were other different trends in education, for example, teaching in a circle or with all the chairs in a straight line.

How did you initially become interested in photography?

Well, when I was in the seventh grade someone gave me a developing kit. The instructions said to go into the dark and load the film. I was living in Florida with my grandmother and the darkest place in the house was the laundry room. The laundry room was actually outside in the back and it had louvers that let light in. I didn’t realize that when they said dark they meant dark. So I figured it out and started processing my own film and making prints.

Kind of like a kid getting a chemistry set or a microscope.

Actually, they had given me a chemistry set when I was younger, but when I blew up the house they decided photography was safer.

You blew up the house?

There was a small explosion with my chemistry set.

So you were just a curious kid who happened to get a developing kit.

Right. Then I got to high school and the queen candidates wanted big pictures of themselves to run for queen. So I did it and became, well, not popular, but….

Known for it?

No. Used. The right word is used.

Right, right.

But it made me think that I was really valuable to these young ladies who really didn’t care about me, they just wanted to get a big picture of themselves. That’s how it all got started.

I read that you’ve taught in public education, community colleges and universities. What kind of environment do you enjoy most?

A university.

You’ve taught fine art photography, commercial photography, and digital photography. Do you prefer one over the other?

It doesn’t matter. I stay away from things that I have no knowledge of. So I don’t teach portrait photography. I don’t know portrait photography. If someone wants me to teach tabletop photography or landscape photography, then we can talk, but portraits, no. How about weddings? No, don’t do that. How about photojournalism? Not really. One of the things you have to realize is that you’re not going to be good at everything.

I read that you have photographs in thirty public museum collections in the US, Europe and Japan. What are your photos about?

Light. I don’t take pictures of things.

Can you give me an example?

You’re walking down the street, and all of a sudden something catches your eye. For me, what catches my eye is the quality of the light, not what is in the light. If you look at the picture on the cover of Teaching Photography, there is no photo manipulation in there other than the way it was printed. It’s basically a straight photograph, that’s the way it was. The photographer saw the quality of that light coming in. He put the shirt in the stream of light, he waited, and then he took the picture. He was taking a picture of light. I do the same thing. Not necessarily direct light like that. If you look at my photograph in the book you’ll notice there is a sense of what the light is doing. So I walk through the world, and when the light strikes me I take the picture.

What photograph are you most proud of? Can you describe it?

I’ll tell you about one, and how I took the picture. I was out photographing one morning; I love to get up early in the morning. So I’m up early and out photographing in Venice Beach, Florida. I’m taking photos at the beach and so on. It’s winter so it’s dark at 5:00 or 6:00 am, and it’s time for breakfast so I’m looking for something that’s open. I see a sign that says Dunkin’ Donuts. I drive up to Dunkin’ Donuts, and I look at this place. Their air conditioner was out. It was probably 45 or 50 degrees outside, and they are making donuts inside, so they are cooking and making steam. The window is just coated with condensation and I looked in, and there was this beautiful light emanating from this window. You could see a table and chair, very geometric. When I set up my camera I noticed that there was a handicapped parking spot there. So it’s very dark and subtle and there is just this huge beautiful glow of light coming off this window. And that’s what the picture looks like. It’s a picture of light.

That sounds nice. Where is that photograph?

It’s in the Dayton Museum of Art, they purchased it last year.

What were your intentions when you got out of school? Did you want to be a professional photographer or a teacher?

Actually, I backed into teaching. I’ve been teaching for forty years.

Since 1966?

Yes, I will be starting my forty-first year this fall. When I was doing my Masters degree at Purdue, I got into being a graduate instructor. It was a job that gave me a scholarship and a little bit of a stipend. The head of the department where I was teaching wasn’t too sure about me. I had a beard, and I wore a rug, and sandals.

What do you mean you wore a rug?

A bathroom rug. Bathroom rugs are warm.

What?

You take a bathroom rug and you cut a hole out of the middle of it and you fold it over and you’ve got this great poncho! Rubberized on the inside. A four foot wide, long-haired shag! I went in for an interview with a guy who is, well, saying conservative is painting him too liberal. He was a conservative guy who needed a teacher real bad so he hired me. At that time at Purdue, we had these large teaching areas. There were two classes in one lab, and so he assigned me to the other half of the lab he was teaching in.

He wanted to keep an eye on you.

Oh yes. And, he was sure he was going to fire me soon. He was a very good teacher and I learned a lot of things from him about being precise and understanding what you are teaching. He mentored all of the young teachers, which is very important to me. In an effort to make sure that the standards were met and the grading was consistent, he selectively checked everyone’s papers that were graded for an exam. Well, my section sat next to his section, and my section averaged five points higher on the exam than his.

Was he impressed by that?

He was dumbfounded. He thought I must be pretty good. Consequently, I figured out that I wasn’t really all that bad at teaching. I started learning things, and I talk about some of the things I learned in Teaching Photography. For example, one morning I went into a class and we were trying to teach something that was really technically difficult. A student asked me a question. I had gone through the lesson and there was a lot of scratching of heads. The lesson presented was what we had been told in our mentoring, but this one student still had a question. He had no idea that he was absolutely the teacher at that moment; his question quickly taught me another way to demonstrate and teach the point in question. When he asked the question what I heard made me realize several things about teaching, one of which was that my students are the best teachers and I learn from them as well as they learn from me. At that point I started realizing the real power of education. Part of this came from the fact that I’m dyslexic, I have a real difficult time reading. It’s horrible, but because of that I started learning different strategies towards learning. This idea from the student just reinforced the fact that all of a sudden, learning is not about teaching, learning is about learning. Teaching is something that helps learning, not the act of presenting subject matter.

I think you said in the book that at first you saw teaching as an activity and not a role, as you see it now. You said teaching was thought of as a well thought-out process of presentations, materials, and methods. Preparation and presentation were the primary sources of teaching.

Everybody sees themselves going into the classroom to make the difference, and yes you will. But they see it as being about them, and if they present it well enough everyone has to learn. That’s not true. What is important is finding the ways in which people learn. You can help them learn if you see yourself as being the noun “Teach”, as in “Hey Teach”, as opposed to I teach. It isn’t about I, it’s about them.

Right. And as you said in the book the valuable goal in education is learning, not teaching.

Absolutely. You want to enable learners, and that’s what the role of the teacher is. I’ve heard people say, “Well, I know the stuff, I can teach it.” Well, no, you know the stuff. It’s not about what the teacher is saying; it is about what the student is getting out of it.

In the book you mention that learning happens for individuals in different ways, and you don’t use the same tools for each student. When you have a class of twenty students, how do you have the time to find out how each individual learns?

The real answer to your question is no sleep. You have to be paying as much attention while you are teaching as you do when you are preparing the lecture. In other words, you have to pay attention when you are interacting. My real role as a teacher is getting students to ask questions. When someone asks a question their mind is open and they are ready to take in information. I can tell when they are asking questions and when they aren’t asking questions.

The book says that the key element to the profession of teaching is attitude, which is a life choice. Do you think attitude is part of a person’s personality?

Yes and no. It is for some and it can be trained for others. There are teachers who students hate, and I know I have been hated as a teacher. Liking the person you are learning from is not a requirement for learning. Ike Lea says in the book, “You have to decide whether you want to learn it or like the person you learn it from.” And he was right. Most really good teachers realize that they don’t have to be liked but they have to care about their students more than they care about themselves. That’s a big problem with a lot of people who go into fine arts teaching is it’s more about them and their art than it is about the students and their art.

You’ve written another book with Focal Press titled, Photographic Digital Capture. How did you come to write your first book with Focal Press?

I had the idea for the book, and I knew there was no book on photographic capture in the digital realm. Right now in school we probably are still more film-based than we are digital, but soon it’s going to be the other way around. So I figured we needed to write a book to fill that gap. So I wrote it.

Did you write it with someone?

Yes. I don’t like to write alone. The reason I don’t like to write alone is not because I don’t like to write, it’s because I don’t know everything. If I do it alone, there will be holes.

How do you know your co-author of Teaching Photography, Richard Zakia?

We were colleagues at different institutes. He was always at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology), and I was never there. We kept crossing paths at conferences and things, and we had similar interests. We talked about things. I actually did the technical pre-publish review for his book, Perception and Imaging. Both of us have an interest in the psychology of images. We don’t always agree, he’s a Gestaltist and I’m an information processor, but we have great onversations. I have learned so much from him.

You’d write with him again?

Yes. At the drop of a hat, or at least taking off my earmuffs. It was a joy. Even though I did much of the writing, he added greatly and he’s a great editor. He did a lot of the editing and cleaned it up. Dick is the only person I would ask to write this book with. We both have the idea that teaching is a concept that betters everyone, including the teacher. Education is the most powerful thing in the world. Dick is one of the few people I know who has actually taught a course in Teaching Photography.

One thing I liked about this book was the way it was put together. It contains submissions by many teachers and photos taken by students. The cover image is by one of your students, correct?

The photo on the cover is from one of my former students, Don Holtz. Every photograph in there is from a student. There are several teachers whose works are in there, taken when they were students themselves. There is a photo in there by me, done when I was a student. In the photo credit we indicate the teacher of the student. In other words, we honor the teachers. It’s about teachers. The photographs happened because of good teachers.

There are some outstanding photos in the book. How did you collect the photos and written contributions?

We did several things. We contacted our friends. Zakia has a better rolodex than I do. We told them we were putting together a book and we are going to put in student photographs, quotes and concept pieces and asked if they were interested. I interviewed teachers, and took the quotes from those interviews. Zakia and I are both big quote people.

In the forward, Mary Virginia Swanson said the purpose of the book is to help the teacher in guiding individuals toward finding their creative voice and teaching the inspiration and motivation to progress their work. Is this book about teaching philosophies and exploring the function of the teacher?

Right. It’s a global view on teaching, and visual arts or however you want to define that. It’s not an idea that there is one set of knowledge and one set of principles that you can go step-by-step and be a teacher. It’s about the thinking that has to go into being a teacher. That’s why there is a section on teaching technology and a section on teaching creativity, and that’s why there is the section on questions and a section on critique – because photography is not one part.

Yes. You mentioned in the book that the camera isn’t everything.

Right. The whole point is, as a teacher it isn’t just giving the great assignment. It’s understanding how to make that assignment lead to the next assignment. It is understanding how one assignment relates to the last assignment. It is how you use that assignment to get people to go and find out about other things we may not even be capable of teaching them. It stimulates them to go on. One of the really great kicks of being a teacher is when your student comes back twenty years later and says “thanks”.

Do you remember the teacher who made the biggest impact on you?

Yes. I had a couple teachers in the seventh grade, but the one who had the biggest impact on me was a guy by the name of Liberty Baily. Liberty Baily was my seventh grade English teacher. Being dyslexic, it is very difficult to function in a seventh grade English class when you can’t read. In the fifth grade I was doing eleventh grade math, but I was reading at less than a second grade level. So anyway, in the seventh grade Liberty was my English teacher, and he also happened to be a diving judge. I happened to be a springboard diver. He judged one of my contests and he didn’t give me any points there either. A few weeks later I got into a slight altercation with one of my friends - I knocked him out but I broke my hand. He woke up in ten or fifteen seconds, I was in a cast for six weeks. While I was in a cast I couldn’t write. Liberty Baily realized I couldn’t write, so he said I’d have to take the reading and spelling test up front, verbally. He said, “I’ve seen you dive, and I know that you can do things, it’s just a matter of figuring out how you do them.” Consequently, by giving me the test verbally, I got an A. I’d been getting D’s in English class.

Do you think it’s because he made you more accountable?

Whatever it was, it taught me that I was learning something, but I was doing it different than everyone else. All of a sudden I realized that you don’t have learn the same way everyone else does. Baily had confidence in my ability to do it, and indirectly found a way to get me to do it. It was because it was different that I was able to learn.

It’s funny how something so small and so long ago could have made such an impact on you. And you remembered it.

Well, that punch was great!

What’s next for you?

I’d like to revise and make changes to Photographic Digital Capture, and do a new book on lighting. It’s an area of expertise that is poorly written about. I’d love to continue to work with Focal Press, because I enjoy the people. When Teaching Photography came out, I asked for Paul Gottehrer to be my production editor because we worked so well together on the first book, and I worked very well with the acquisitions editor, Diane Heppner on both books. I’d like to have five current books in print at one time, right now I have three.

What are you most proud of; your photographs in museums, your books or your teaching?

My kids, and I’ve been married for 38 years.

How many kids do you have?

I have two grown children who make me proud. On the professional level, one of the things I’m most proud of is the fact that some of my students are taking on what I have helped them learn and passing it on to others by doing their own work or by being teachers.

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This article by Jacqui Tavis
j.tavis@elsevier.com