Things I Love to See #4

4. My students on a photo shoot, going for it

Happy First Friday

It's First Fridays in the South End, and while I'll be hitting the highway and heading out of the city right when the gallery doors open, I did make a trip last month with a group of Literature of Photography students to see the November openings and open studios down at 450 Harrison Ave.




Note to gallery owners:
Everyone's happy at an art opening when there are cupcakes.

In addition to eating cupcakes and being wowed by the imaginative qualities of painting after a months of scouring photographs and examining the photographic process, we saw a visually - and technically - intriguing show at Gallery Kayafas, one of Boston's best venues for art photography. Caleb Charland uses multiple and long exposures, mathematical equations, and natural light sources like candles, light pens, and sparklers to make these cool black-and-white prints. It took us forever to figure out how he made some of these exposures - and in the end, he had to explain to us how some were made. See if you can figure them out:

Learning is Fun

I designed and implemented a new class at Emerson's Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies called The Literature of Photography. It's a class of 19 freshmen, about half writing majors and half arts majors. We are reading the usual suspects: Sontag, Barthes, Berger, Calvino. We also write poetry, study and critique narrative photography (what photography isn't, somehow, narrative?), and go into back alleys and take pictures of each other.

You can find some of my students' work on our Tumblr site. I will continue to brag about them as the semester goes on, I'm sure.