It’s hard to make interesting images of such iconic buildings. How do you avoid convention and cliché? The Brutalist opens inside a ship’s dark hold and climbs up through it to the deck where the light breaks in and the Statue of Liberty rotates into frame completely upside down. The titles then scroll in a modernist type with the spacing pulled about, letters set at unusual intervals and accompanied by graphic elements. Sebastian Pardo, the designer, researched Bauhaus books and Moholy-Nagy’s typophoto, the welding of photograph and type into a unified graphic statement. I recognised the visual grammar, more than a hundred years old, and found it both thrilling and disorientating. A language that seems settled and historical, safely shelved in the museum, can still turn the familiar upside down and make you look again.

In my post about John Pickering’s War in the Meadow I promised a review of a recent purchase, a book about the marriage of word and photograph, though it comes at it from an unlikely direction. L is for Look, edited by Anne Lacoste and Rose Durr and published by Spector, is the catalogue to a travelling exhibition and a study of the children’s photobook, that odd, half-forgotten genre in which photographs were set to work teaching the very young. I have a weakness for these books and for their close cousin the prison photobook. They sit nearer to one another than they sound. One is an habilitation, the education of a looker who has not yet learned to read the world. The other is a rehabilitation, the education of someone the world has locked away. Both put photographs in front of people held under some constraint and ask what an image can teach and what it can be made to testify. The War in the Meadow post explored the gap between the story a child tells and the thing the darkroom makes of it, full of pedagogic opportunity. I opened L is for Look looking for that gap and found it on nearly every page.

The genre begins in a faith that the book itself slowly takes apart. When Edward Steichen photographed everyday objects for his daughter’s The First Picture Book in 1930, the case for it was that a photograph gives the child raw, unbiased reality, this is a fork, this is a plate, with none of the viewpoint a drawing smuggles in. The photograph was trusted because it looked like fact. A good part of the pleasure of L is for Look is watching a hundred years of the people who made these books discover that photographic facts won’t sit still, that a photograph of a fork also carries with it a whole cluttered afternoon and that the surplus, the part no caption ever quite settles, might be where the teaching quietly happens.

That L is for Look exists at all is the first thing to notice. There’s been almost nothing in English on the children’s photobook, which until now has been studied seriously only in French, by Laurence Le Guen and the scholars gathered around the PHLIT database. What Lacoste and Durr have done is claim the genre for the history of photography and lift it out of children’s-literature studies, where it always ranked below drawing as the poorer and more literal cousin. For anyone who thinks with photobooks, that redraws the map and adds a shadow century to it. The exhibition it accompanies is touring, and hopefully lands at The Photographers’ Gallery some time in 2027-28.

The book is also, in its making, an argument. Helmut Völter and Ina Kwon have designed it so that each children’s photobook is photographed as an object, caught mid-turn, floating on coloured grounds keyed to the sections, its captions and texts set on thin inserts that interrupt your view of the book spreads. I found that it took me a while to work out which book was which. The effect is a mild disorientation and I’m fairly sure it’s deliberate. I’ve been mostly trained on the adult art photobook, expecting a clean sequence and the captions filed at the back. This design encourages you to encounter pictures that haven’t yet been pinned to their words. You do the matching that a child does.

The spread above lines up three of Dominique Darbois's Enfants du monde books from the 1950s, Rikka la petite Balinaise smiling above, Parana le petit Indien asleep in his hammock below, Achouna le petit Esquimau building his igloo opposite, each child named for a people. The Balinese girl is bare-shouldered, her gaze turned away, beautiful in the warm humanist manner of the decade and made available to be looked at. The igloo is built on the page from cut photographs, a way of living turned into a diagram. The text has us descend from a plane onto one of the most beautiful countries in the world, the planet laid out for a Western child to tour. It is the Family of Man remade for the nursery, resting on the faith this book is otherwise dismantling, that the photograph is a transparent window, a universal language carrying the world in all its diversity. It is the fork-is-a-fork faith enlarged to the size of the planet, the neutral surface doing the extracting. The book sees this, to its credit, and its introduction identifies the white-boy default perspective and prefers a more inlcusive selection. But a corrected selection cannot change the shape of the archive it draws from and the beauty of these pages is some of what carries you past the politics in them.

Later on, a page from Serge Bloch and Rascal's Mon petit roi, presents a black-and-white photograph of a hand, a finger appearing to draw a thin line of ink. The verse wonders what the line is — a horizon, a washing line, a road, Ariadne's thread? We'll see. Two kinds of mark share the paper. The hand is photographic, a real hand that was there, lit and particular. The line is a drawing, a pure schema. The photograph is the fact of the hand. The drawing is everything the line might yet become. The child is left in the gap and must do the joining. Below it, Hannah Höch's Bilderbuch presents the wilder version, an imaginary photomontaged creature, sailing above the world in order to keep her little feather dress clean.

The book is organised into sections, from Education through to what it calls Photographism, each a way that photographs have been put to work for the young. Olivier Lugon’s essay on Aenne Biermann’s 60 Fotos of 1930 traces the children’s photobook back to the New Vision, to Moholy’s claim that the person who can’t handle a camera will be the illiterate of the future and to the avant-garde’s dream of a photographic literacy that would overtake the written word. The Bauhaus grammar I’d met in the cinema, it turns out, went into the nursery. Allegra Baggio Corradi makes the observation that photography stays subordinate to text in the curriculum because it has no formal grammar, nothing to fact-check and nothing to mark, so it sits badly in a system built on measurement.1

In sum, despite photography’s pervasiveness today, the medium is not yet considered a language proper and is still associated with alternative methods for teaching and learning, mostly outside the classroom, often devised by artists.

— Allegra Baggio Corradi

She begins to turn this over, proposing a “shift in the way education is conceptualized” so that it can make more room for what photographs can do. I want to turn it a little more.

In the education of very young children we give words and pictures more or less parity of attention. The picture book and the primer both grant the image equal standing with the text, set close together, each doing different but complementary work. And then, in secondary school, the settlement changes. The word is handed the authority and the image is demoted to illustration, to the thing a child is shown while the real meaning rides in the sentence. We spend the early years teaching children that images mean and the later years teaching them that images are not to be trusted with meaning of their own. Literacy is language. Numeracy is maths. Pictures are arty farty and, mostly, shoved to the margins.

Why does the switch happen? One possible reason is very old. Reformed Protestantism carried a deep suspicion of the image, the word trusted as the vehicle of truth and the picture suspected of idolatry. A culture shaped by that inheritance may only ever license the image as a ladder to literacy, welcome while the child is climbing towards the word and taken away once the child has arrived. It’s not a tidy story. The founder of teaching-by-pictures, Comenius, who made the Orbis Pictus, was a Protestant bishop, and the fiercest distrust of images belongs to traditions that cut clean across the line between Catholic and Protestant. There’s a duller explanation too. Schools are built to measure and will always prefer what can be easily assessed. The word and the number are more easily marked than the the look. Whichever is the larger cause, the two push the same way, towards a classroom in which the image is welcome as a means and mistrusted when it tries to be an end.

Which leaves the photography classroom as one of the few places in a school where words and images might be given equal billing. The looking it teaches won’t resolve into anything you can easily put a tick against. It belongs to the part of education that opens a complex world rather than delivers a predictable outcome.

Most of what governs us now arrives as an image, below the level of argument, persuading without declaring itself. Someone who’s been taught to look, to hold a picture open against its words and to notice the gap between them, is harder to govern by pictures. The children’s photobook has been doing this work all along, testing the gap between words and images for over a century, on the youngest readers, in a form we have underestimated. L is for Look takes the form seriously, which is reason enough to own it. The statue above the ship is the most familiar thing in the world until it’s turned upside down and you have to look at it again.

L is for Look: Children’s Photobooks, Spector Books, 2025

These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.

Buy me some film

In recent weeks I’ve found myself doing one of two things. Either spending a whole day carrying a camera and not making any pictures or deciding not to take a camera and spending the whole day looking for photographs I can’t make. When I have a camera I look hard, frame a few things, focus carefully, go as far as half-pressing the shutter release once or twice. A day of nearly photographs. When I don’t take a camera it’s mostly because I’m with my family. I like to pretend that I’m more available, more present for them and maybe I am a little. But I’m still framing shots just without the ability to make pictures. Either way, there are no images to show for the effort.

Calvino completed five memos. Lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity. He died before the sixth was written. Esther Calvino’s note says it was to be called Consistenza and that it was to be about Melville’s Bartleby. That’s all the evidence we have and everyone who writes about it, including me, is filling a gap.

I’m not sure about the word consistency. In English it suggests reliability or doing the same thing each time and I began by preferring ‘substance’, because consistenza also carries suggestions of density and heft. But I changed my mind. Consistenza is what a sauce has, or clay, the property of holding together, whether a thing keeps its shape when it’s no longer supported. Bartleby has no substance at all. He lives on ginger nuts and occupies a corner. What he has is that he will not change his shape. He will not conform or deform.

The lawyer

In Melville’s story a Wall Street lawyer hires a scrivener, someone who copies documents. Initially, he works productively and silently at a desk by a window facing a wall three feet away. When asked to help proofread, he says he would prefer not to. He goes on saying the exact same phrase each time he is asked to do something. He stops copying, stays in the office, is found to be living there and won’t leave when dismissed. Rather than remove him by force, the lawyer moves his practice to another building. The new tenants have him arrested. He eventually dies in the prison yard, refusing food, lying on his side by the wall with his knees drawn up.

I thought this could be an allegory of photography and I spent a while trying to force it into shape. Bartleby is the photograph, mute, with plenty of surface detail, but refusing to say what it all means. It sounds plausible until you realise that the photograph doesn’t refuse anything. It complies instantly with whatever is asked of it, including the uses that harm people, which is why it can be so easily conscripted. Bartleby would prefer not to. The photograph doesn’t have preferences.

Then I considered Bartleby as the photographer who declines the frame, who chooses not to make the photograph for whatever reason. That doesn’t work either because Bartleby’s refusal is absolute and he dies refusing. Any essay that ends by admiring him has recommended starving in a prison yard.

Then Bartleby as the archive, the thing that will not be got rid of and can’t be made to explain itself. Or the file that can’t be opened because the technology has moved on and can’t remember what to do with a .jpeg. Each of these works for a while and then doesn’t and after a few hours of this back-and-forth I realised I was doing the same thing as the lawyer in Melville’s story. He’s the narrator. He likes explanations for his employee’s odd behaviour. Bartleby’s eyes have failed at the dim window. His constitution is disordered. He once worked in the Dead Letter Office in Washington, sorting undeliverable mail for burning. But these are the lawyer’s consolations. We’re never given access to Bartleby’s thoughts. We know all about the lawyer’s exasperation and charity but Bartleby is just a surface.

The story is a trap for anyone looking for a motive. Deleuze finds a formula that hollows out language. Agamben finds potentiality withheld. Political readers find the refusal of labour. I tried to make it about photography. We don’t know what Calvino would have found. What the story exposes is the reader’s desire to project.

Resistance

Gert Biesta, my favourite philosopher of education, describes two ways an encounter with the world might go wrong. One is world-destruction, where you force the material until it gives you what you had in mind, overriding whatever it was. The other is self-destruction, where the resistance is unbearable and you withdraw from the encounter altogether. The interesting place is in the middle, which he calls dialogue and involves staying in relation to something that pushes back without either dominating it or fleeing from it.

Photography looks like a poor candidate for this. Clay fights back, the blank paper fights back, the exposure takes a hundred and twenty-fifth of a second and the apparatus does all the work. Baudelaire’s objection, roughly. But what if the resistance isn’t in the medium itself but is in the world, which won’t arrange itself for you, or hold still? That’s harder than clay, since you can’t work it. You can wait, or move. Or you can just accept the refusal. And it’s not a matter of how much world you go out to meet. You don’t need to be standing on a busy street to feel the world’s resistance. The classroom is the world. The pale light through the dusty window, the scratched desk, the badly arranged bookshelf or the friend who agreed to sit still but won’t stop giggling. And there’s the resistance you feel when the image comes back and it’s different to the thing you were excited to make. And the edit, where you struggle to organise images you made last week. Pictures that you wouldn’t make today. Biesta uses the slightly unwieldy term subjectification for the moments when a young person meets something that resists them and is free to decide how to respond to it. Free to decide includes, of course, the freedom to decline. A student who can only ever comply is being objectified. The refusal doesn't have to be dramatic or even articulate. What’s important is that the option is real, because if it isn't, whatever the student produces tells us about the teaching and not much about them.

A procedure

I couldn’t write this memo the way I wrote the other five. Like Calvino’s memos which refer to other texts, my memos refer to photographs, things you can put next to one another. And there is no Calvino either.

So I decided to try something else. I gave my five previous memos to Guido, my AI photography guide (familiar to regular readers of these posts) and, with one condition of my own, that no names of people survive, asked him to design a constraint, fixed before reading rather than after. A way of compressing or editing the texts by chance.

The procedure he devised involved considering the five posts as one continuous text, first to last, discarding every sentence containing a person’s name (as requested by me), then keeping only sentences containing a word of negation or absence, from a list settled in advance: no, not, n’t, nothing, nowhere, nobody, no one, none, never, without, gone, missing, remove, removed, removal, absence, refuse, refusal, left out, leaves out. A hundred and four sentences were left. From these he selected every sixth sentence, for the memo that’s missing. No editing afterwards was allowed, the order was preserved, nothing cut or added to smooth the joins.

There are a couple of strange sentences. “A removal of distractions” and “Not precision as measurement” are fragments. I preferred not to remove them. My no-names rule left pronouns and demonstratives pointing at nothing. That refusal refers to no refusal. “The second” has no first. “The Internet is not his multiplicity” has a his with nobody behind it. The poem is a surface that gestures at an interior it will not disclose. I’ve deliberately set it as a paragraph rather than as lines. A prose poem of sorts. Run together it reads better and lies slightly about its origins, since a paragraph is the shape of continuous thought and lends unity to whatever it contains. A prose poem also has edges, like a photograph. Baudelaire, who wrote prose poems and despised photography for being a mechanical procedure, would say a poem made by counting to six proves his point.

I then remembered another sampling method, from Tom Phillips’ A Humument.

I asked Guido to re-visit the text of the five posts and make a slightly more Phillips-esque selection, individual words and short phrases from separate lines, in order, 100 or less in total, top to bottom. Whole sections could be left untouched but the resulting ‘poem’ needed to make some kind of (abstract) sense. I was interested in the idea of a photograph, framing the visible, including but mostly excluding. I was interested in what judgements Guido would make. As always, the pre-thinking before the utterance was fascinating:

Let me work through the source material systematically, pulling key phrases from each section—starting with the opening about imitation and reality, moving through Calvino's observations about bodies and silver halide, then the latent image passages about absence and presence, the hidden mother's vanishing, and finally the Ishiuchi material about what remains when the mother is gone. Continuing through more observations about how images work—Talmor's invented landscapes that never existed, the FSA photographs edited with holes, camouflage nets designed to hide through fabric, letting materials reveal themselves over time. Halpern's precision capturing the exact moment something remains unfinished, visibility as mental projection and impossibility, light passing through slides rather than reflecting off them.

[…]

Now I’m reading through the lines for flow and sense — checking how the language sits, whether each image lands, whether the progression from “nothing on the film” through the silver and the shutter and what’s left behind feels coherent and weighted.

I’m trying to reshape these fragments so they read more like a continuous run, the way words survive on a Humument page and still form something sentence-like, rather than just a scattered list.

Here is the resulting poem. All the words are mine, framed by Guido, following an occlusion method inspired by Tom Phillips:

Another look

The lawyer goes back, returning to Bartleby’s corner again and again. Each visit is a fresh attempt to solve the same problem. He questions him, offers him money and a room in his own home. He’s hoping that something under the surface will announce itself and account for the refusal. It never does. Eventually, the returning becomes unbearable and he moves his practice to another building and leaves the man in the empty rooms. Bartleby is arrested and the lawyer visits the prison to make sure he’s fed well. This is a real kindness following an abandonment. What he never does is look at Bartleby without wanting something from him.

There’s a lot of talk in photography education about attention. Be present. Look properly. Slow down. I’ve said and written similar things myself. It seems to me now that the difficulty isn’t that people fail to look but that looking is expected to pay. Each of the lawyer’s visits is the same visit. The surface he keeps looking past is all there was ever going to be. Not because there’s nothing behind it. If we think of Bartleby as a person, rather than just Melville’s literary device, the reasons for his refusal surely exist. They are simply not available, which is also the photograph’s condition. Everything in a picture was caused by something. The door is that colour because somebody painted it. The poster is pasted there because somebody had a job to do that morning. The woman is standing at that angle for her own reasons. None of these causes are recoverable from the picture. The surface covers a plenitude you can’t get at. Which is why the projecting is so hard to stop and why captions exist. The emptiness argument is the wrong one.

I often go back to photography exhibitions. Four times to one show last year, five to another, mostly because I like them and sometimes because it’s raining or I need the toilet. I’m wary of dressing this up. It’s a habit and returning can be nothing more than the pleasure of recognising my own taste, which is just a kind of connoisseurship. Usually, by the third or fourth visit I already know everything in the rooms. Whatever happens then doesn’t feel like acquisition. There are photographs I’ve been looking at for over thirty years and I could describe most of them from memory. They haven’t become clearer. The looking hasn’t accumulated into a definitive interpretation and I’ve stopped expecting it to.

So the quality, if it is one, is remaining in front of something that will not pay you for your time. Not patience, which implies a delivery date. Something more like a willingness to stay unreconciled, to keep a thing in view after it has stopped offering anything.

Consistency in this sense isn’t a property of the photograph. The photograph asks very little of us and will sit somewhere for decades, waiting. Whether anything holds together is a question about the other side of the encounter.

Here are links to posts #1 (Lightness), #2 (Quickness), #3 (Exactitude), #4 (Visibility) and #5 (Multiplicity) in this short series:

These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.

Buy me some film

I taught my first ever lesson from a slide carousel. I was twenty-two, halfway through a literature and art history MA, when I was recruited by a local college of art and design to teach a course on Victorian painting. I was a callow postgraduate who knew less about the subject than I pretended. Each week I would go to the slide library, select the images I needed, load the mounts in what I hoped was a defensible order, turn out the lights and talk.

It was terrifying. Undergraduates of various ages, some of them older than me, sat in the dark while I advanced through the images. One afternoon a lecturer came into the room, assumed I was a student and began dismantling the projector on the grounds that his need was greater than mine.

I still love slide projectors. I’ve used them at school. Students have cut up old 35mm transparencies, bought cheaply on eBay, and recombined them into constructed landscapes, inspired by Dafna Talmor. When I come across a projector in a gallery I feel a small lift. And when I began taking photographs more seriously in the early 1990s I shot slide film almost exclusively, mostly Kodachrome, which came back in those yellow oblong boxes through the post from a lab in Paris. I’ve just got all of them out of storage and scanned them.

A slide is backlit, like a screen. The light comes through the image rather than bouncing off it, which is a different relationship from the one you have with a print, and it’s now how most photographs reach most people.

The knot, not the heap

Calvino’s fifth value is the one that sounds most familiar. He devotes the lecture to the contemporary novel as an encyclopedia, as a method of knowledge and, above all, as “a network of connections between the events, the people, and the things of the world.”

The obvious photographic response to this is the Internet and the trillions of annual uploads, the archive expanding faster than anyone can look. Penelope Umbrico, Erik Kessels, Taryn Simon have all found ways to make that visible, and machine vision now sorts it at a scale no person could. But I don’t think Calvino is talking about quantity. The Internet is not his multiplicity. It’s closer to being its opposite.

His central example is Carlo Emilio Gadda, whose detective Ingravallo maintains that catastrophes are never the result of a single cause. They are a vortex, a whirlwind of converging motives. Gadda has various words for this: knot, tangle, muddle. The point isn’t that there’s a lot of it. It’s that everything is tied to everything else. Calvino admires Gadda’s “frenzied desperation”, the tension between rational exactitude and frenetic distortion that he thinks underlies every act of knowing. He compares this with the cool mathematics of Musil, and then Perec, whose Life A User’s Manual moves through a Paris apartment building room by room following a knight’s move across a ten by ten grid, ninety-nine chapters where there should be a hundred, a loophole left open on purpose.

A heap isn’t a network. A pile of images accumulates; a knot connects. The web is an enormous heap that mostly fails to become a knot, which is why it’s exhausting rather than encyclopedic. What interests me is the other thing where lots of images are held in careful relation to one another.

An Educational Archive of 2863 Slides

Frido Troost taught art history at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. He ran a shop called the Institute for Concrete Matter which dealt in photography of every kind, daguerreotypes through to family albums. He died in 2013, and in 2020 Art Paper Editions published every slide he had used in his teaching, all 2863 of them, laid out nine to a page in the same non-hierarchical arrangement he used in class. There is an essay by David Campany. There are no captions.

I bought it because of the carousel.

It’s not an easy book to love unless you have stood in the dark hoping that what you have assembled makes some kind of sense. What it gives you is the shape of one man’s looking, in Amsterdam, after the war, with all the fixations and blind spots that implies. Advertising, erotica, art objects, portraits, scientific illustration, cinema stills, other people’s snapshots. In the accompanying essay, David Campany quotes a line of August Sander’s from a letter to a friend:

A successful photo is only a preliminary step toward the intelligent use of photography. Photography is like a mosaic that becomes a synthesis only when it is presented en masse.

The single image is preliminary. The meaning is in the mass and in what ends up next to what.

Campany also describes his own habit of assembling pictures for a talk before he has decided what he might say about them.

That moment when the visuals are present and the words have not yet taken concrete form on the page, or in the mouth, is special. It is full of possibility and imagination.

He often waits, after showing a sequence, before he starts to speak. He suggests that reading Troost’s book is like that, the “mute time with the images, before the words begin to flow.”

On the left of the spread I have chosen (above) there is a Dior advertisement for a perfume called Poison, a Marlboro Lights billboard with horses, and a man standing at a bank of card index drawers. Above them a room full of filing cabinets, a crowd of upturned faces. Above that, a woman’s eye in close-up, a leopard, a baby on a bed. On the right there is a Russian constructivist magazine cover, a spirit photograph, a scientific plate of a fish with its parts named in Latin, Garbo and, in the bottom corner, a baby in a cot.

All the same size. All in the same black grid. Nothing to tell you how to weigh them.

There is a review by Jörg Colberg which points out, fairly, that a good deal of what Troost taught with runs along the lines of the male gaze or standard colonial photography and that the book reproduces it without correction. It’s a dead man’s slide library, published as it was. That’s OK. We don’t need to tidy up historical image sets, and the editorialising that gets added now, in case anyone is offended, tends to destroy the evidence. What one man chose to teach with is a document of how he saw and the prejudices are part of it. But the curated grid offers no protection against its own contents. A dead child and a cigarette advertisement are given exactly the same nine-per-page democracy. The method that lets you see how a mind worked is the same method that lets old poison pass as natural gas.

Two of the slides on that spread are photographs of archives. Troost chose pictures of filing cabinets to teach with and they sit in a book which is itself a filing cabinet.

Ein Dorf 1950-2022

In the 1950s Ludwig Schirmer was the master miller in Berka, Thuringia. He was a self-taught photographer and he documented the place, the work, the festivals and the fields. He later became one of the best known advertising photographers in the GDR. He died in 2001. Among his effects were a few prints and a great many negatives of the Berka pictures, which his daughter and son-in-law began printing in their own darkroom and which turned out to be very good indeed.

The daughter is Ute Mahler, who grew up in Berka. The son-in-law is Werner Mahler, who in 1977 chose Berka as the subject of his diploma at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig without knowing that his wife’s father had photographed it twenty years earlier. Twenty years after that, in 1998, Stern asked Werner to go back and photograph the flowering landscapes Helmut Kohl had promised. That work was never published. In 2021 and 2022 Ute went back and made portraits of the young people of the village, some of them the great-granddaughters of the people her father had photographed in the fifties.

The publisher’s description of the book lists these as a series of coincidences, and then, arriving at Ute’s return, notes that this one wasn’t a coincidence at all.

The four pictures I’ve put together here span the seventy years. A family in the fifties, arranged outside a brick farmhouse behind a picket fence, two of them seated, someone holding up a cloth. Werner’s teenagers in 1977, in a hall under the GDR emblem, flared jeans, half dancing, not quite looking at each other. Werner’s men in 1998, bow ties, a bar, an American tobacco advertisement on the wall where the state emblem used to be. And Ute’s girl, alone in a long dress in front of a whitewashed shed, a power line behind her and a field of wheat.

Michael Grieve, reviewing it, writes that photography projects which collaborate with the deceased “have the potential to breathe new life and recontextualise how we understand the past, the present and project with unease into the uncertain future”, and that “not only is society in perpetual motion but the meaning of photographs are always constantly in a state of flux.”

A photograph never fully closes, which is exactly why it stays available to be reordered, reprinted, or given to a daughter to finish. Schirmer joins a conversation he could not have known he was part of. And the flux doesn’t care what it’s used for. Berka is in a part of Germany where the AfD now tops the poll. A loving return to a home village is one edit away from blood and soil and the identical photographs, in a slightly worse mood, would make the reactionary version of this book without a single change of content. The looseness that lets Ute honour her father is the looseness that lets anybody appropriate him.

The Archive of Bernard Taylor

Bernard Taylor was an amateur photographer in Hastings-on-Hudson who made what he called worksheets, photographs mounted on card and annotated with quotations from Gertrude Stein, Tanizaki, Mary McCarthy, Pasteur and Mill, together with cryptic captions of his own. After his death six boxes of this material were bought for forty dollars at an estate sale by a filmmaker called Peter Ward, who selected and edited them, wrote a preface, and could not resist adding his own notes on local history. The publisher then added an afterword which critically re-examines Ward’s editorial decisions and describes the agonising process of preparing the edition.

But Bernard Taylor doesn’t exist and neither does Peter Ward. The title page clearly states: conceived, created and designed by Tom Lecky.

Lecky is an antiquarian bookseller. He’s spent years handling provenance for a living, the bookplate, the inscription, the laid-in letter, the marks that turn one copy of a printed multiple into a unique object. In an interview with BOMB, published under the title “The multiple becomes unique”, he says the book uses many of these same strategies, from anagrams and acrostics to rigid formal grids.

The photographs are Lecky’s own. What he’s fabricated is the apparatus that vouches for them. The provenance, the chain of custody, the disputing editors, the scholarly agonising. He’s manufactured the machinery by which an archive gets certified as real and then he lets you watch it wobble.

After I’d bought the book, I read Eugenie Shinkle’s review in C4 Journal. I’d been researching connections between the Oulipo and photography at the time. I’d spent some time with Bernard Taylor’s archive and felt something was off without being able to say what. So I eventually wrote her a long rambling email asking about the structure, and adding that I’d wondered whether the whole thing might be an elaborate hoax. She wrote back to say I’d solved it, that she had worked it out herself when things stopped making sense, that the interview with Peter Ward in her review was a lightly edited transcript of her email exchange with Lecky, and that she had decided, in the spirit of the game, not to out him. She added that the relationship between the text and the images would go on puzzling her for a long time to come.

Most puzzles die when they’re solved. This one doesn’t.

Shinkle’s review contains a useful definition of authorship:

If, by ‘author’, we understand the person who shapes the presentation of a work (if not its interpretation), then The Archive of Bernard Taylor has at least two and potentially many more authors involved. The ‘meaning’ of this book isn’t just to be found in the photographs, or in the ephemera, or even in Ward’s strange addenda, but in the hidden structures that hold them together.

One of the image captions reads “Three Heresies Hit a Whom”. The photograph is a street at night, a house, a tree. Nothing remarkable. The caption announces itself as a cipher and withholds the key, and after a while you stop trying and simply enjoy the sensation of an order you can feel but can’t reach. That’s the book’s method at the scale of a single page, and it is why the constraints work. They’re not there to be solved but to be sensed and enjoyed.

On one spread, a low white heap of something, salt or sand, spilling out from under a shed roof, fills the right-hand page. On the left, in small type:

To have objects all around me in my house. To know exactly their state and location in that incredible disorder. If I do not see a brass soap dish for a month, I always add the right amount of mental tarnish to it.

Adding the right amount of mental tarnish to an object you can’t see is what an archive does to the dead and what Lecky has done to a man who never lived.

On another spread there’s an ‘editor’s note’, a partial list of Hastings’ former industries. The marble quarry. The steam sugar refinery. The Zinsser Chemical Company, which manufactured tannic acid, wood alcohol, photographic chemicals and dyes, and produced mustard gas for the effort in the First World War. The Anaconda Wire and Cable Company, which bought the American Brass Company along with the world’s largest copper mines in Chile and Mexico, and whose PCB mixtures impregnated cables for the US Navy. Facing it, a photograph which is almost entirely black, a garage door with four lit panes and almost nothing else visible.

Photographic chemistry sits in a list with chemical weapons and colonial copper and a picture beside it that’s almost all deep shadow.

What keeps all this from being a display of cleverness (it easily could have been) is that Lecky trusts the reader. Nothing is over-determined. The erudition (antiquarian, chemical, geological, local, literary) is worn lightly and the book is witty in a way that never becomes a performance. It smiles rather than laughs. A laugh announces the joke. A smile waits for you to catch it and lets you be pleased with yourself when you do.

If there’s one quality I would want to pass on to students, and I find it in most of the work I love, in music and writing as much as pictures, it’s that. Knowledge without solemnity and wit that punctures rather than performs.

The encounter

Troost’s grid asks you to join the dots. Seventy years of a village sit uncaptioned and let you feel the time yourself. Lecky trusts you to notice the conceit. The gap between images and words, to reiterate David Campany’s phrase is “full of possibility and imagination.” It’s what happens in a good classroom.

I’m less worried about machines making hollow work, since they will make good work soon enough, or that authorless things are less valuable, since I don’t believe that value is simply found in an author’s pulse. There are plenty of boring photographs, dull novels and silly songs. What I worry about, mostly, is the other side of the encounter. That we stop showing up. That the connections get made for us, that the gap gets filled before we reach it, that the pile arrives pre-sorted and we never enter the space where the meaning actually happens. The threat is our own withdrawal.

I’ve chosen the images on this page. Eighteen slides out of two thousand, eight hundred and sixty-three. Four photographs from a village. Two spreads and three photographs from an archive running to a hundred and forty-one pages.

Calvino ends his lecture as follows.

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.

It’s a humane thought and also a disquieting one, because the arranging and reordering of everything is now industrial and the sentence describes both the richness of a person and the operation of a machine trained on all of us.

What it doesn’t settle is who is shuffling the deck.

Here are links to posts #1 (Lightness), #2 (Quickness), #3 (Exactitude) and #4 (Visibility) in this short series:

These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.

Buy me some film

In his talk about Visibility, Calvino refers to Dante who, during the Purgatorio “is presented with scenes that act as quo­tations or representations.” Calvino is interested in these mental images, things seen in the mind rather than with the eyes. Images formed by the imagination, “high fantasy”. There are two kinds: images that are promoted by words and others that begin visually and may result in verbal expression. The relationship between words and images is central to photography education. I have therefore chosen to present a sequence of diptychs, randomly produced by the PhotoPedagogy Diptych generator. I’ve also included randomly generated excerpts from a text by Valeria Luiselli that concerns itself with ‘The Cartography of Empty Spaces’.1 I rediscovered Luiselli’s book, hidden in plain sight in my library.

This post began as an exploration of the concept of mental images in photography but that seemed like the wrong fit. I have opted instead for allowing the images themselves, alongside short extracts of text, appearing together by chance, to do the work.

Calvino wonders where mental images come from and quotes Douglas Hofstadter:

Think, for instance, of a writer who is trying to convey certain ideas which to him are contained in mental images. He isn’t quite sure how those images fit together in his mind, and he experiments around, expressing things first one way and then another, and finally settles on some ver­sion. But does he know where it all came from? Only in a vague sense.

This is therefore “some version” of a memo on visibility, using “quotations or representations” and arriving at a settled meaning “only in a vague sense”. It’s meant to be playful, rather than theoretical. I have deliberately left the images uncaptioned, as they are in the generator. I mean no disrespect to their authors, but authorship isn’t what I’m asking you to attend to here. They are all photographs of photographs, some of which you may recognise, made by me from books I own.

Architecture, according to Roland Barthes, should be simultaneously the projection of an impossibility and the putting into practice of a functional order.

With the persistence of a mosquito around a lightbulb, I prowl the shelves in search of that book, that page, that underlined phrase I vaguely remember.

It’s always better to keep rapping thoughts into the keyboard, like drilling holes in the ground, until the exact word emerges.

The journeys we make during the reading of a book trace out, in some way, the private spaces we inhabit.

There are texts that will always be our dead-end streets; fragments that will be bridges.

A restorer fills the holes in a surface on which a more or less finished image already exists; a writer starts from the fissures and the holes.

No, writing isn’t filling gaps, nor is it constructing a house, a building, just to fill up an empty space.

Here are links to posts #1 (Lightness), #2 (Quickness) and #3 (Exactitude) in this short series:

These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.

Buy me some film

You can order a copy here.

A lot has changed since I first mentioned it. What began as a broader book has narrowed to its proper subject: teaching, and the people who do it. It’s addressed to colleagues in schools, FE and HE, though I hope it travels further than that.

It’s not a text book or programme of study. It’s more of a book to think with and against. It begins with the threshold concepts and the big ideas that haunt the photography classroom, then sets a series of parallel texts against the teaching, reading photographs closely to see whether the theory survives contact with actual images. Those chapters owe a debt to Tim Carpenter’s To photograph is to learn how to die. There’s an account of a cautious experiment with an AI photography guide, a chapter on Peace Photography, a frame borrowed from de Certeau’s strategies and tactics, and an afterword about unfreezing pipes.

Underneath it is an argument I’ve grown more certain of while writing. Photography education is under pressure from several directions at once: from what we now know about the medium’s entanglement with power, industry and the climate; from ‘reforms’ that treat education as a delivery system; and now from AI. It would be easy to read all this as a case for teaching photography less, or more defensively.

I think it’s the opposite. We still need people in classrooms pointing at things for particular students, and then trying to say, if only to themselves, why they bothered.

Leaning on Biesta, I’d put it this way: photographing is one of the ways a person rehearses coming to terms with a world that resists them, that does not compose itself on request. That is worth teaching, and worth defending.

More in September, including some information about the design, which deserves its own post. For now, I’m glad the book exists and keen to know what readers think of it.

Designed by Cameron Leadbetter | Printed by Gomer Press
B-format, 128pp. Edition of 200.

Buy the book

My friend and neighbour Philip Smith is a painter. He works in series, using systems, and a while ago he asked me for a set of numbers. I generated them randomly, using the constraints he gave me (rows, columns, a range) and sent them back. I’ve just been down the road to see the result, the first painting in a new series and mine to keep, in exchange for some photographs of his work for his website.

The whole of the previous day I had been worrying away at this post and found a dead end. I walked down to Philip’s house thinking about where I might have got stuck.

The painting surprised me. Not a canvas, like his other recent systems paintings. He’d removed the centre of a square of wood so that the painting was around the edges, in what looked like a frame but was actually a remainder. What was left when the middle had been taken away. The panel has several layers, so it sits proud of the wall, closer to a relief than a picture. There are overlapping circles in colours the numbers had chosen, against a flat ground. My arbitrary numbers, the algorithm, plus Philip’s control and precision, had produced something I found beautiful. I stood there feeling that the work was exactly right, and unable to say why, precisely.

Calvino’s third memo is Esattezza, and the English “exactitude” makes it sound fussy which I don’t think he meant. Esatto in Italian is an everyday word, the one you use for a sum that adds up or a time that’s correct. Calvino summarises the value as a well-defined design, a clear and incisive image and a language precise in its choice of words. It’s not pedantry. It’s closer to rightness, to the fit between a thing and its purpose. The French refer to this as the mot juste. Not precision as measurement. Precision as fittingness.

It’s a quality you reach by looking again, not by getting it right first time.

Calvino refers to two very different writers at the end of his essay. Ponge and Leonardo. Francis Ponge published the drafts of his poems in sequence because he prized the series of attempts rather than the finished line. Leonardo filled his notebooks with a gnarled, spiky language, worrying at a description over and over in search of something more subtle and precise. He tried three times to write about a sea monster he’d imagined rising from the deep because its force required a particular combination of words. The exactitude, the fittingness, was in the search for the right ones.

I want to follow that thought through some photographs that I love. They are held together by instinct rather than argument. They rhyme at odd angles. It’s mostly about construction, return and the strange afterlife of pictures.

Built to be believed

Wilson Bentley famously photographed snowflakes. From the 1880s until his death he caught them on a black board, then transferred each one to a slide, photographing it through a microscope before it could melt, thousands of times over a lifetime, no two alike. The examples above show each crystal on a circle of black. The exactitude is constructed. The isolation, the darkness, the enlargement, all of it built to make the thing legible, built slowly, one melting specimen at a time.

James Nasmyth went further and built the Moon. In 1874, before a telescope could photograph the lunar surface in the detail he wanted, he modelled craters in plaster from his own observations, lit them in raking sunlight and photographed the models. He published them in a book called The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, and the plates are convincing. The one illustrated below, a “Normal Lunar Crater,” reads as a photograph of the real surface seen from just above the rim. It’s a fiction, made carefully, in the service of a truth. You’d think you were looking at the Moon unless you were told otherwise.

A few years ago I included both these examples of exactitude in a resource for the Royal Photographic Society. We often think of the scientific photograph as the coldest, most literal, most exact kind of image. And yet much of it is imagination and modelling and patience, closer to Leonardo worrying at his monster than to a hunter waiting for the world to compose itself. The cult of the caught instant, the much misunderstood ‘decisive moment’, came later, with small cameras and roll film. The older tradition was always slow, always constructing. It treated the picture as one step in a long study rather than a moment to be seized.

Fittingness, in Bentley and Nasmyth, is a thing made. The black ground. The plaster crater. Built to be believed.

A placeless place

Dafna Talmor makes what she calls Constructed Landscapes. She photographs landscapes on medium format colour film, often while visiting family, who are scattered across several countries, since her own heritage is mixed and her meaningful places are not in one geography. On their own she finds these single frames inadequate. A photograph of a landscape cannot hold the experience of being in one, the turning of the head, the immersion, the different densities of light, the sense of continuity just beyond your field of view. This is an old problem. Gustave Le Gray, in the 1850s, printed his seascapes from two negatives, one for the sea and one for the sky, because a single exposure couldn’t resolve both. Talmor takes the difficulty further. She cuts her negatives and splices them, combines them physically, and prints the composite. The landscape in the final image never existed anywhere. Sometimes the joins are soft. Sometimes they declare themselves, pale flag-like shapes where the film was cut, the seam left showing.

The pictures are not documents of a particular location. They’re about her relationship to places that mean something to her, blended across the distances between the people she loves. They are placeless places, landscapes you can’t see all at once and certainly the one we are all inside now, the warming world too large and too dispersed to picture. Timothy Morton calls that kind of thing a hyperobject, something real and everywhere and impossible to grasp in a single view. Talmor’s cut landscapes are more honest about that than a straight photograph would be because they reveal their madeness.

The back section of her book presents various versions of each composite, the same constructed landscape worked over and over across months, the seams shifting, notes in the margin, “too dark, too cyan,” a first version from November, a new first version the following May, the darkroom timings noted beside them. It is Ponge’s sequence of approximations, made visible. It’s the looking again that is the work. And the negatives she shoots are made partly to be kept, archived, used later. The delay is hard-wired into the process.

Another look

Recently, I’ve been exploring the FSA archive, particularly the work of Gordon Parks and Dorothea Lange. The Farm Security Administration sent photographers across Depression-era America and gathered around 175,000 pictures, now digitised and free to download, which I have had students edit into zines. Roy Stryker, who ran it, shaped what the photographers looked for and killed the negatives he didn’t want by punching a hole through them, around a hundred thousand of them. The archive we have is not the archive that was made. It was edited, in part, with a hole punch. As Lange herself commented:

The FSA file is usable in many different ways. There are a hundred different complete exhibits in that file.

— Dorothea Lange, quoted by Sam Contis in Day Sleeper

Sam Contis recently plundered Dorothea Lange’s archive at the Oakland Museum California, to make a book called Day Sleeper. “The images here are Lange’s;” Contis reminds us, “the selection and the relationships between them are mine.” It’s a great example of the photograph going on doing work long after its author has gone and the purposes it was made for have lapsed. The images were loose enough, indeterminate enough, to be read again.

I’m interested here in a particular pair. First, a Lange photograph of an eagle killed by a rancher and spread against a barbed-wire fence, wings forced open, every feather made legible, a warning pinned to the wire for other predators to read. Then, over the page, two women in headscarves and masks weaving an enormous camouflage net, a fabric built to convince an enemy’s eye that there’s nothing to see, just a landscape. One bird made hideously exact. One surface made to defeat exactness, to fake an empty field. The net is Nasmyth’s double. Both are constructions made to be believed, both pass themselves off as unremarkable nature. The plaster fabricates a Moon that isn’t there. The net fabricates the absence of the machinery of war. Two exact fictions, a century and an ocean apart.

Towards the end of her life, she had begun to move away from thinking in terms of individual images, and was experimenting with ‘photographic statements’ — ways of grouping images so as to express ‘relationships, equivalents, progressions, contradictions, positives and negatives etc. etc.’

— Sam Contis quoting Dorothea Lange

There’s the judgement you make with the camera at your face. It’s instantaneous, forward-facing. Is this right, now? And there’s another kind that’s slower and turned backwards, made with the material already gathered. Collecting, sorting, placing one thing beside another, waiting until the time is right, not forcing the thing to close. Both are judgements about fittingness. The second is the one that’s harder to teach and maybe impossible to measure, because it looks like doing nothing. It’s the long game, and it’s more of a disposition than a skill. The patience to stay with something over time, to let it sit until it tells you what it is.

Returning

For over twenty years, Gregory Halpern has photographed in and around Buffalo, New York, his home town, returning repeatedly. Last year, he published King, Queen, Knave, a book of these images. It’s a strange set of pictures, half-mythical, a Buffalo that is both the actual place and a dream of it. Smashed eggs on a pavement. An angel pencilled on a wall. Lone figures in the suburban edge-lands. And a white deer that reappears throughout the book, glimpsed through red grass, the token of the return that comes back to remind you that you’re in it for the long haul even as the city keeps shifting.

I love the broken eggs. At first glance it looks like a spoiled breakfast, whites and a broken yolk bled across the concrete. But the book has been rhyming the tiny with the vast all the way through and, by the time you reach them, the eggs read as planets, a scatter of small worlds, cracked and dispersing their contents, a universe collapsing on a Buffalo pavement. And what about that serpentine form top right? Arthur Siegel called photography a poor man’s Rorschach, and here’s the proof. You look at broken eggs and, primed by the return, see a cosmos, and the image is loose enough to hold both.

Then there’s the cover, which is also the penultimate image in the book. A galaxy, stars and a red nebula, set into the panels of a suspended commercial ceiling, the ordinary white grid you find above a strip light. The infinite, tiled into an office system. It is Bentley’s snowflake at the other end of the scale, the crystalline order holding a cosmos, except that here the order is a suspended ceiling and the cosmos has been fitted into it, domesticated and modular. Calvino spent the whole of his exactitude lecture torn between the crystal and the flame, the fixed perfect form and the thing that will not hold still. Halpern’s ceiling is both.

Coming into view

The final image is of birds thrown across the night sky. Crows I think, taking flight against bare, flashlit branches. Fukase’s ravens are somewhere behind them, though the gesture has reversed. His birds were crowded by grief, made symbolic of his loss. Halpern’s do the opposite. They decentre the looker, make the human frame small against a too-full world. This is the camera’s odd democracy, its generosity, the thing Lee Friedlander made a virtue of, its refusal to rank, its rendering of everything at once with the same attention. It leaves you with far more than you can gather and a little overwhelmed.

The birds are also Leonardo’s sea monster. Almost visible, almost gathered into a shape, and then not, exceeding the frame like the creature exceeded the three sentences he struggled to finish. The camera is precise about every bird and cannot make them cohere. Precision meets the uncontainable and records, exactly, its own limit.

I think this is a quality worth passing on. A quest for fittingness. The patience to stay with something until it is nearly right and to leave it there, just short of closed, where something is still coming slowly into view.

Here are links to posts #1 (Lightness) and #2 (Quickness) in this short series:

These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.

Buy me some film

My friend Vaughan gave me a copy of Fukase Masahisa’s Ravens for my sixtieth birthday. A generous and well-chosen present, not only because it was a book I’d wanted for years and never bought for myself. It arrived at the point where I had decided to slow down, taking my pension and stepping back to teaching two days a week. Ravens is a book that rewards a lingering look. Black birds against a pale sky, or looming into the frame, smeared across it as a blur that a faster shutter would have frozen. They’re grainy to the point of abstraction, often barely legible. He made them over roughly a decade, in the years after his marriage ended, meandering through Hokkaido and shooting from train windows. The birds have been read as omens, as the black weather of a mind coming apart. The book feels like a descent. Something worsens as you turn the pages.

Time takes no time

Nothing happens in Ravens. There’s no sequence of events, no plot you could recount to someone who hadn’t seen it. There’s only recurrence, the same black shape repeating, changed a little each time and a thickening mood.

Calvino, in his lecture on quickness, admires the folk tale for its economy. A king falls ill, an ogre’s feather is needed. A loyal servant sets out on a quest. Nobody explains the illness, or why an ogre should have healing feathers. The teller leaves the inessential out and the listener fills the gaps. The pace is achieved through omission. He quotes a formula used by Sicilian storytellers when they want to leap across months or years: “time takes no time in a story.”

A photograph is that economy taken to its limit. It leaves almost everything out. Everything outside the frame and everything before and after the instant. The movement, the sound and whatever duration the thing had, gone. What remains is a single laconic statement that the viewer has to expand back into a world. If time takes no time in a story, it takes no time at all in a photograph, because there is no time left inside it, only the sliver the shutter kept.

In Ravens, Fukase gives us a run of these slivers, each holding almost nothing. We read it like a folk tale. We fill in the gaps. What we pour in is grief and the shape of a failed marriage. The story is ours. We supply it at speed, because that is what a sequence of suggestive pictures provokes. We mistake our own filling-in for something the book is telling us.

I don’t think photographs tell stories. They are too indeterminate for that. Narrativity is a quality they borrow from language. The story is supplied by the reader’s imagination.

Alec Soth has a lovely way of drawing the distinction, in his talk about real vs. story time. Story time, he argues, is what happens when we build a narrative across a set of images, the man mowing his lawn and the meal that seems to follow him, connections we invent and can’t justify. Real time is the time of simply looking. Two frames close together, the eye flickering between them, catching the small change, the tilt of a head, the crescent of light that has moved. Real time expands a moment sideways into attention. Story time runs off ahead of the pictures and builds something they never held.

The flicker is quick. Your eye jumps between the frames, holds the first in memory while it reads the second, and in that jump it does what Calvino’s listener does between two spare sentences. It supplies the connection. So the quickness that matters in photography was never the shutter’s. The shutter is merely fast and getting faster. The quickness is the viewer’s; the eye’s acuity.

And it’s true of Ravens too. To read these sequences you have to be quick and slow at the same time. Quick enough to catch the difference between one frame and the next, alert, alive to the smallest change. Slow enough to stay, to allow the flicker to become a gaze. The two pull against each other. Alertness wants to move on. Patience wants to settle.

The trigger

If Fukase shows narrative pressure at its most intense and then withholds the story, there are photographs of birds that never felt the pressure at all. They work in a different register entirely.

For example, consider Étienne-Jules Marey and his photographic gun. In 1882 this French physiologist wanted to study birds in flight and could not do it with the stationary cameras Muybridge had lined up along the track for his galloping horse. So he built a gun. You raised it to your shoulder, tracked the bird across the sky, pulled the trigger, and it took twelve exposures in a second on a rotating plate.

This is the quick eye at its most confident, the human mastering the bird’s flight by out-pacing it, breaking the wingbeat into stopped instants invisible to the naked eye. There is no story. In these chronophotographs, where successive instants fall onto a single plate, the movement overlaps into a chain, a bird appears in twelve versions of itself, a wingbeat laid out as pure gesture. It is closer to a notation for dance than to anything we could call a tale. Movement studied as movement, abstracted, with no event attached. Marey compresses time into the frame. He stacks the instants so the eye does not have to hold them. What he leaves is a diagram of motion with no need to recount anything.

The pillar

A century and a bit later, Stephen Gill did something that looks like the opposite of Marey but might, in fact, be a strange kind of cousin.

Gill moved from Hackney to rural Sweden. In a field near his home he planted a post, mounted a camera on it and rigged a motion trigger so that birds landing would take their own pictures. Then he left. The camera fired when a bird arrived and The Pillar, the book he made, is a run of the same frame, the same patch of Swedish sky and field, with a different visitor dropping into it each time. A fox wanders through. A deer. Mostly birds, dropping in and lifting off again.

The photographer’s quick eye has been removed altogether. Gill was not there. The decision about when to make the picture, the choice Marey took down the barrel of his gun, has been handed to the bird. It trips the shutter with its own weight. In the language of Karen Barad, whom I stumbled through in an earlier post, the cut has migrated into the encounter itself. The apparatus is no longer an instrument the photographer points at a passive world. It has become a perch and the picture is something the bird and the post produce between them, a meeting of the universe halfway.

That it takes place in the midst of a landscape characterised by repetition, in which time is cyclical, sets up a keen existential dynamic: on the one hand, everything has happened before, there’s nothing new under the sun; on the other, every moment is unique and carries the hallmark of the miracle: what happens happens only once and never again.

But this wasn’t what I thought about the first time I looked at these photographs. In fact, I barely thought at all, for I was shaken, as a person so often is when confronted with an extraordinary work of art. I’d never seen birds in this way before, as if on their own terms, as independent creatures with independent lives. Ancient, forever improvising, endlessly embroiled with the forces of nature, and yet indulging too. And so infinitely alien to us.

— Karl Ove Knausgård

There is a growing sense, as you turn the pages, that the birds have taken to the game, that they know something is happening and have begun to perform. It may be true, since some birds can watch and learn and are cleverer than we think. Crows, jays, magpies and ravens. But it might also be the old trouble returning, the narrative impulse dressing recurrence up as intention and granting the birds a knowingness because we can’t bear a shape to repeat without a mind behind it. Fukase could not stop his ravens meaning something about him. Gill can’t stop his birds seeming to mean something about themselves. The meaning arrives, in both, in the gap between the frames, supplied by a viewer who won’t leave a returning shape alone.

Hurry slowly

Marey and Gill sit on either side of Fukase like two kinds of dance. One aims and compresses time, the other lays down the instrument and waits. Neither tells a tale, because both work in that register where gesture and recurrence stand in for event. Fukase, between them, loads his sequence with all the rhythm and pull of a story but with no narrative to hold.

Calvino took as his motto the old tag festina lente, hurry slowly. He had a fondness for its emblems of the dolphin coiled round the anchor. His lecture on quickness spends its second half defending slowness, digression and the pleasures of lingering. What he prized was the command of pace, the freedom to quicken and slow at will. “The more time we save,” he writes, “the more we can afford to lose.”

Our machines have taken the first half of that and thrown away the second. The camera gets quicker every year, the burst mode, the dozen exposures fused into one, the feed that refreshes before you’ve finished with the image in front of you. All of it is engineered to remove the wait and the friction. To make looking efficient. Interesting photographs and the books they populate do the opposite. They put the friction back. They force the page-turn and the back-and-forth, the small resistances that slow the eye down and make it work hard.

It would be easy to end by reaching for the birds, sending them off across the horizon as a metaphor for a medium migrating somewhere we can’t yet follow. I’d better not. A bird makes a poor vehicle for our meanings.

Where does that leave us? My school, like all others in the UK, is introducing a strict smartphone ban in September. It’s an attempt to create a protected space for greater concentration. A removal of distractions. My feelings about this are ambivalent. I can see the value in keeping at bay the demands of the digital world, but I’m troubled by our inability to tackle the issue of social media addiction head on. A ban removes the fast distraction but doesn’t, by itself, teach the slow attention. It might even let us believe the problem is solved by subtraction when the harder work, the cultivation of quickness, has not begun.

Meanwhile, the students I see two days a week have thumbs trained to move, to catch a thing and flick past it. They’re primed by their devices to look briefly and move on. The work I care about asks them to be quick in a different way. Festina lente. Quick enough to notice. Patient enough to remain.

Here’s the first memo on lightness:

These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.

Buy me some film

I visited the exhibition of Japanese women photographers at TPG in the middle of a heatwave, once with and then again with my wife. I usually go back a few times to an exhibition I like.

Each of the rooms has a title printed on a long banner of purple cloth hung from a wooden pole. The one that I was most excited to see again was “Elevating the Everyday.” The text explains that the Japanese word for photography, shashin, can be read as something close to “imitation of reality” or “representation of truth”, and that the photographers gathered under this heading attend to what one of them calls the small miracles of ordinary life. Their photographs, it says, do not imitate reality. They elevate it. This is close to being the reason I like to make photographs and also the reason why I like to teach photography.

Earlier in the day, the always interesting Graham Hooper had emailed me with some ‘alternative’ Threshold Concepts for Photography.1 We batted a few messages back and forth and then he reminded me of Italo Calvino’s list of six memos.

The book is Six Memos for the Next Millennium, the Charles Eliot Norton lectures Calvino was preparing when he died in 1985. He finished five of the six, on lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity. The sixth, which he meant to write once he reached Cambridge and never did, was to be called consistency. I’m a big fan of Calvino’s writing and Graham’s email left me wondering what it might mean to take his qualities, values he wanted literature to carry into the new millennium, and apply them to photography instead. I could try to add the missing sixth. I realise there’s something absurdly impertinent about this. I’m not claiming any special authority. I’m not a photography expert. I’m a semi-retired photography teacher who only works two days a week. But I’ve got more time on my hands to think about stuff like this and it’s fun. So, please, take this series of posts with a large pinch of silver halide.

I should say at the outset that I can’t see the future any better than Calvino could. He had no appetite for that kind of forecasting. What he did instead was go the long way round, through old stories and images, trusting that a quality worth keeping would show itself in the past as clearly as in whatever was coming. For this post, and maybe some of the others too, I’ll do something similar. I’ll place photographs next to one another and try to draw a line between them.

Lightness first, then.

The picture that doesn’t exist (yet)

Think about what happens between the shutter and the developing bath. The exposure is over. The light has done its thing but there’s nothing on the film. Yet. A few crystals of silver have been altered, too faint to see, and the picture waits inside. Photographers call this ghost the latent image and it’s the lightest thing in photography, lighter than the negative and the print, because it hasn’t yet become visible.

What does that do to the photographer? You could be photographing a christening or a catastrophe and yet walk away with the same weightlessness in your hands. A roll shot at a funeral or a fairground rattle alike in the canister and will lie in a drawer for a year with equal indifference. Whatever gravity the pictures have is all potential. You carry a grave cargo and feel only the ordinary lightness of a small machine.

This lightness is the medium’s founding condition and it points to all three of the senses Calvino gave the word. There is the lightness of what a photograph is physically, a skin of silver on paper. A gram of nothing. There is lightness as a way of working, which for Calvino meant the subtraction of weight and which photography performs by lifting a piece of the heavy world and handing it back to you as a shadow. And there is lightness as something missing; the weight that had to be removed for the image to float free at all. That last one is the one that interests me most.

The mother under the cloth

There’s a kind of eerie nineteenth-century photograph, named only recently, in which a small child sits looking out at us with the wide unfocused patience of the very young. And behind the child, holding it upright, there is a person who has been made to vanish. A child won’t sit still for long, so somebody had to steady it and that was almost always the mother. To keep her out of the picture she was draped in a cloth, or set behind the backdrop with only her arms reaching through, or scratched out of the negative afterwards. What survives is the presentable child and, behind it, a shrouded mass, a pair of hands arriving from nowhere. Collectors have taken to calling them hidden mother photographs. Linda Fregni Nagler’s book gathered a thousand or so of them at which point the thing we weren’t supposed to notice became the only thing we could see.

The mother is the weight. She’s the gravity in the picture, the labour that holds the soft body vertical against its own wish to slump. She’s been subtracted so the child can float free. Lightness by removal. Except that here the thing removed is the one doing all the work.

I’d been thinking about these pictures as curiosities until I read something that mentioned, in passing, who was often standing behind the camera. By the 1860s photography had become one of the few trades thought respectable for a middle-class woman and in a single decade the number of female professional photographers quadrupled. They learned, like everyone, to keep a baby still using whatever worked. Some hung a caged bird or kept a monkey in the studio to catch the child’s eye. Others reached for the chemistry. One trade magazine of the period recommended a dose of opium, which would, “effectually prevent the sitters from being conscious of themselves, or of the camera, or of anything else.”

There’s more weight, folded inside the lightness. The buoyant, weightless likeness of the floating child, bought at the price of a narcotised infant and an erased woman. Calvino, reading Kundera2, put it better than I can. Everything we choose for its lightness, he says, soon reveals its true and unbearable weight. He meant it as a truth about living but it turns out to be a fairly precise description of a photograph.

The dress on the lightbox

A hundred and thirty years on, in the room with the purple banner, we encounter Ishiuchi Miyako’s laid out clothes on a lightbox. These include her mother’s things, a slip, a shoe, a girdle, a lipstick worn down to the shape of a mouth. The mother is gone and present in the one form left available, as the hollow the cloth still keeps. The gesture is the hidden mother’s, turned the other way about. There a living mother was covered so a child could be seen. Here a dead mother is uncovered and brought up into the light so that she can be seen at last. Cloth in both, a mother in both.

Ishiuchi used a similar method for Hiroshima and the garments of strangers killed by the bomb. She says she approached that subject from the position of not understanding.3

I’m an outsider, from elsewhere, so I can’t truly approach things from the same angle, or fully comprehend the sadness and pain of atomic bomb victims. So I started from the standpoint ‘I don’t understand’. I have only spoken to one actual atomic bomb victim, but I have a dialogue with those possessions that have been left behind. Those possessions don’t speak, but I am still having a dialogue with those silent relics. When I spread them out under natural light, I think that the missing girl who owned them might come home, might wear this dress. So when I photograph, I try to show them looking smart, looking beautiful. Well, the owner won’t come back, but that’s the image I have in my mind when I take the photographs.

— Ishiuchi Miyako

I walked in ready to distrust the loveliness of these pictures. Their surfaces are so persuasive, so luminous. But the artist’s own words took my objection away. The beauty is not a cosmetic laid over the absence. It’s hospitality extended towards the absence, a place set for a guest who cannot arrive, and made beautiful anyway because the alternative is to give up on her ever coming. The photograph is put to no use at all. It documents nothing, since she disclaims the knowledge a document would need. It consoles no one, the owner not being available for consolation. And that uselessness is exactly its refusal to be spent. The lightest thing photography owns, the luminous trace with no body left in it, turns out to be a form of waiting.

It’s no surprise, then, to learn that Ishiuchi trained as a textile artist.

I studied textiles at college, so I am more alert to the details of textiles and cloth than most people.

— Ishiuchi Miyako

Cloth everywhere: the drape over the hidden mother, the slip on Ishiuchi’s lightbox and the wall text itself, floating as a purple textile rather than stuck to the wall. The exhibition chooses to speak about these women through the material that runs through so much of their work, and through the folding and laundering and mending that sits under it. The cloth holds the argument up the way the draped woman held the baby up, structural and meant not to be noticed. The banner is the show’s own hidden mother.

Unbearable lightness

The luminous trace is never as weightless as it looks. Silver is a heavy metal, dug and smelted. The photographic industry was built on coal and the image it hands us so lightly is made by relocating an enormous weight somewhere the picture will never show, into the mine, the tannery and the warming air.4 Ishiuchi’s lightbox runs on an electricity that is, in Japan especially, partly nuclear, which is to say that the light summoning her dead is a tamed cousin of the light that killed them. The same mastery of matter gives us the reactor and the weapon, the lightbox and the flash that printed human shadows onto stone. I may come back to all of this. For now I only want to leave it here, felt rather than excavated.

It was still thirty degrees when I emerged from the air conditioned gallery. The whole visit happened in a heatwave and the warming we have made is felt, in the end, as an excess of light. Lightness as energy, which builds things and unmakes them with the same indifference. The lightness was almost literally unbearable.

I went home in the heat and thought about going back for another look.

These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.

Buy me some film

This particular list is inspired by Desert Island Discs and by Stephen Bull’s excellent Desert Island Pics (some of which appear on the Photoworks website), in which photographers choose eight images to take into exile. My version is about photobooks. I’ve chosen nine, claiming one as a luxury item, in the spirit of the radio show’s rules. These are the books I’d want right now, as companions for an enforced period of solitude. Nine is not that many. There are many wonderful books not included. The list is not intended to be balanced, judicious or representative. It’s just a list of things I currently love in no particular order. It might look different tomorrow.

Thomas Boivin: Belleville, Stanley Barker, 2022

At first glance, Belleville is a modest book. Black-and-white photographs made over many years in a single Paris neighbourhood. But the longer you stay with it, the more it reveals itself as a book about duration rather than place. Boivin accumulates small, unremarkable encounters: mostly gestures, glances and fragments of architecture. The sequencing is open and allusive. I have all of Boivin’s books including, bizarrely, two copies of the portraits made at Place de la République. I saw a wonderful exhibition of his pictures in 2024 at Les Douches la Galerie in Paris. The prints were stunning and Stanley Barker do an excellent job of reproducing them in book form. I love the design, the cover, the feel of the paper. It’s exquisite.

Belleville models a form of photographic patience that is utterly unspectacular. It’s romantic, careful and quiet. Boivin’s frames are beautifully balanced and finely crafted. The pictures manage to be both of their time and timeless. On the island, I’ll have plenty of time to pay careful attention to my surroundings and this would be the book to remind me that photography can be slow and faithful and geographically constrained..

Guido Guidi: Veramente, MACK, 2014

Truly, anyone who knows me or has read my posts here will not be surprised to find Guidi represented. His work asks almost nothing of the viewer except close attention. This 2014 book is the one that introduced me to his photographs of ordinary Italian landscapes: road edges, walls, doorways and weeds. The industrial margins. I’ve got the recent retrospective tome, Col tempo. It’s more complete. But there’s something compelling about a first love. The pictures in Veramente are a sustained meditation on looking without hierarchy. Everything is granted equal dignity. There are no compositional heroics. No climaxes. Instead, you get an ethic of presence. Guidi photographs as if trying to meet the world at eye level. He seems very comfortable with the interstitial, both in terms of the subjects he chooses and his position in the art world, although he’s become something of a hero in recent years.

I travelled to see his exhibition at MAXXI in Rome last year and again in Paris earlier this year. Not many photographers make me plan holidays. This would be my calibration device on the island. A book that quietly insists the world does not need improving before it can be seen.

Nigel Poor: The San Quentin Project, Aperture, 2021

In 2011, Nigel Poor began teaching photography history at San Quentin State Prison. Neither books nor cameras were allowed inside, so she improvised. Students crafted verbal photographs of memories they had no images for. They annotated printouts of canonical work by Eggleston, Shore, Friedlander, their handwriting crowding the margins. Later, Poor gained access to thousands of negatives from the prison’s own archive, made by corrections officers documenting the routines of incarceration. These became the basis for further exercises in looking, remembering and writing.

After the first semester, one student told Poor he could now “see fascination everywhere in San Quentin.” Prison sharpens attention. Survival depends on reading a room, noticing who stands where and when the atmosphere has shifted. Poor’s exercises gave her students permission to apply their attentiveness to photographs and then to themselves. On a desert island, a lesson in constraint and the power of the imagination might be a question of survival.

Rahim Fortune: Hardtack, Loose Joints, 2024

Fortune’s book is grounded in place and lineage. Texan landscapes, Black communities and family histories. The photographs feel fragmentary in a good way, held together by rhythm rather than explanation. He works through atmosphere, gesture and repetition, refusing simplification. Hardtack is made from a combination of flour, water and salt. It’s a food associated with survival and migration. It has an extremely long shelf life.

I lived in Texas for a year in the mid-nineties, just when I started taking photography seriously. I can’t pretend that there isn’t an element of nostalgia in this book choice. But Hardtack demonstrates that photography can carry cultural weight and still be formally adventurous and that a person can survive extreme hardship and retain their dignity.

Jason Fulford: The Heart Is a Sandwich, MACK, 2023

I could have chosen any number of Fulford’s books. I have a few. I’m a big fan. This one really foregrounds the importance of play, structure and sequencing as serious inquiry. Fulford builds visual arguments through juxtaposition, recurrence and surprise. It’s a kind of visual novel in twelve chapters. It reminds me that meaning arises from adjacency. Photographs don’t have to explain themselves individually. They can think together. I’ve long been interested in chance, games and productive misalignment. Fulford operationalises all of that with precision and great wit. I’d also get a second slice of Guidi for dessert!

This would be my reminder that photography can be funny, strange and rigorous at the same time. And I’ll definitely be in need of a sandwich.

Peter Fraser: Two Blue Buckets, Cornerhouse Publications, 1988

Along with Jem Southam’s magnificent The Raft of Carrots, which sadly I no longer own, this is one of the first serious photography books I bought, from the old Photographers’ Gallery bookshop off St. Martin’s Lane. Fraser photographs ordinary things with a particular intensity. His pictures pose questions. What’s beneath the surface? How does this relate to that? Fraser’s training as an engineer and his interest in the subconscious are the driving forces of his inquisitive, restless search for revelatory meaning in the everyday. The original 1988 edition of Buckets, designed by Alan Ward, remains my preferred version. Its cover features a schematic diagram of the titular buckets, giving the book the appearance of an obscure scientific manual. It’s an exemplary piece of book design.

Buckets prefigured much that followed in British photobook culture but arrived before the language existed to describe it. Fraser’s work sits between art photography, documentary practice and conceptualism. He occupies an unusual and special place in the story of British photography. After all these years, the buckets keep calling to me.

Dafna Talmor: Constructed Landscapes, Fw:Books, 2020

I’ve known Dafna for several years. She’s visited my school and I’ve taken students to her studio. I feel like I know her images really well, but the experience of seeing them on the wall is always breathtaking. This is mainly because she physically reworks photographic prints, cutting and recombining negatives from different locations to make hybrid landscapes. You feel the labour, the care, the precision and the happy accidents in the resulting images. I bought one of her prints for my brother’s 50th birthday. I have a couple of my own. The book, meticulously designed by Hans Gremmen, presents photography as a construction site rather than a window. I remember seeing some of the early works in a small gallery in Margate, long before the book existed. They were the best things in the show by far. I love the way the book honours the process, celebrating what is often hidden: editing, assembling, adjusting, deciding. Photographs are made, not found.

On the island, I hope it might function as a useful reminder that life, like photography, can be re-made.

Tom Lecky: The Archive of Bernard Taylor, Understory Books, 2021

This is a photobook that performs the rhetoric of the archive while quietly pulling the rug from under it. It presents itself as a posthumous recovery of a photographer’s life and work. Spoiler alert! Bernard Taylor may not exist. The photographer could be an invention, the “archive” a constructed apparatus, a plausible fiction in the guise of documentary order.

This is what makes the book so unsettling. It doesn’t lie. Rather, it stages the conditions under which we are willing to believe: boxes, labels, sequencing, historical tone, authoritative texts, associated ephemera and institutional calm. It’s playful and serious. What happens to photographic truth when the frame around the image is fabricated? How easily does authorship become a costume? How much of “photographic evidence” is really a matter of context, typography, paratext, confidence? It employs some Oulipian constraints. It’s cryptic and puzzling and a lot of fun. I may need a fair bit of that on the island.

Giorgio Wolfensberger: Foto Povera, Edition Patrick Frey, 2018 (luxury item)

If this were Desert Island Discs, Wolfensberger’s would be my ninth choice. I’m claiming it as my luxury item. It’s a slightly odd selection. Not all the photographs in it interest me equally. For example, I could do without some of the graffiti pictures. And yet it’s a book I’m very fond of. Like a wayward nephew.

Wolfensberger was a Swiss-Italian photographer who spent his working life between Winterthur and Umbria. He was also a filmmaker, an expert on the dancer Suzanne Perrottet, and a photographer of the flora of the Portofino region, assembling a kind of photographic herbarium. The title is perfect. Foto Povera: poor photography, humble photography, photography made from scraps. Urs Stahel, in an accompanying essay, calls his subjects: “An inhabited house. A rutted road. A broken signpost. Glass panes smeared with graffiti. A rickety old mailbox.” The world in use. Trousers in use, as Barthes would say.

What I love is the spirit of it. The simple pleasure of looking and recording. Wolfensberger photographs everything with the same earnestness and gentle humour. His photographic world, like mine, is mostly empty of people but full of evidence of human presence: the marks we leave on surfaces. Stahel calls him “a photographic phenomenologist of everyday life” and writes about him the way one might write about a friend who has died, with affection and precision. “Thank you, Giorgio,” he concludes, “for this dance of things [...] life-affirming in every square inch of its frame, and yet much alive to the mortality of all things.”

Oh, to be remembered like that.

Nine books, a borrowed format, one question. Which photobooks would you take?

These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.

Buy me some film

It’s from 1976, the year I started secondary school, and it has aged honestly and painfully. Despite Pickering’s fondness for the snapshot, and some generally sound advice about privileging neither technical craft nor aesthetic experimentation, photographers are all men, a good camera is a Hasselblad and the author’s fondness for lith printing has the quality of a private devotion. Most disturbing though, on page sixteen, beneath the chapter heading The New Medium of Photography, sits a photograph of a naked infant, captioned, “Starving child in Africa.”

However, Pickering’s introduction also invokes the Bayeux Tapestry. Imagine, he says, how much more we would understand of 1066 if only they had owned cameras. He sounds a bit sad about it. It’s an odd idea. The tapestry is not a record that history was too primitive to take. It is embroidery, made by the winning side, an argument in wool about who had a right to the throne. It does not show the Conquest. It constructs it. There is a small additional irony, which is that Pickering himself trained as a textile designer, so of all people he might have known that a thing made in thread is a thing made, and not a window. Follow the thread and the tapestry keeps company less with the photograph-as-evidence he is pining for than with a piece of work buried forty pages deeper in his own book, with some children in Cheshire and a bonkers story about another kind of battle.

The sequence is called War in the Meadow. The children, nine or ten years old, invented a story that became a photo essay. Three friends are bored in a field. Strange things start to happen. They are chased by figures in gas masks. They fall into their school dinners. They disintegrate in an explosion of flowers. They are caught in a spider’s web and get away on a flying cup and saucer. Then they are back in the meadow, baffled. It is magnificent nonsense. And it’s rendered, in black and white, with a sophisticated understanding of analogue processes the children plainly didn’t possess. Two negatives are sandwiched in the enlarger to conjure the flying cup. The printers use a stock of ‘thin negatives’, kept low in contrast so that a cloud can be married to a face. The dream is the children’s. The grammar that makes the dream visible belongs to skilled adults.

I don’t mind this at all. The war game is transformed by a medium and a person who understands a darkroom. It’s also returned to the children as something they didn’t entirely intend. And that gap, between the story as told and the thing the apparatus made of it, is the most educational space I know. A child saying “flying cup and saucer” to an adult, who then makes it appear, is issuing a prompt and the darkroom is the machine that renders it, slowly, through craft and time and an archive and another person’s knowledge. A child today types the same words and has the image in four seconds, altered by nothing, having met no-one.

My last Walk with Guido drifted into war and couldn’t find the way out. The girl on the road at Trảng Bàng, Didi-Huberman and the pictures made at Birkenau in spite of everything, a wooden box that a German prisoner made for my great grandparents, an enemy who came to kill and stayed to garden. I thought I’d finished with war for a while. Then I opened a children’s photography book and found it in every chapter. The tapestry brings a conquest. Page sixteen brings a famine. The meadow brings gas masks, and behind the gas masks a war that actually happened, because a British reader of a certain age knows where a gas mask in a 1970s field has come from. The country issued them in their millions and children once carried them to school in little cardboard boxes. War is what the Pickering book can’t stop photographing but never once names.

I sat down with the good people from APHE last week, after the conference that had to be called off because too few people registered. The talk turned, as it does, to purpose. What is the association for? What is a photography education for? The honest answer, which nobody quite says out loud, is that photography education’s purpose can’t be economic because on that ground it comes second to anything with a straighter line to a wage. It’s no longer my fight. Thirty-six years in one school, now teaching just two days a week. When I finally go, someone will take the register on Monday morning and the building won’t feel a thing. If photography education dwindles, it will be because too few people were willing to fight for it and I find I can say that without much despair. You do not make a case for a meadow. A meadow is not for anything. It gets mown. It comes back or it doesn’t, according to the weather and the will of the field. What you do with a meadow, while it’s there, is walk into it and look hard.

Pickering concludes with a list of possible purposes for photography education and a modest ad for Hasselblad.

The changing concepts in education are demanding new ways of teaching […] Danger lies only in adopting a narrow approach.

The children in the Cheshire meadow are pensioners now, like me. Photographed at nine or ten in 1975, they are past sixty, nearer the end than the start. They played at a war and the photographs have outlived the game and will outlive the players. The flying cup, the spider’s web, the school dinners they tumble into, the explosion of flowers; all of it machinery built to hold a child still. And yet all it shows now is exactly how a child can’t be fixed. The girl on the road at Trảng Bàng is sixty-three. One war was play; the other wasn’t. Each of them froze a child out of their own future and each has aged off-camera while the picture stayed young. The photograph is the one machine we have built for the express purpose of lying to us about time. We hand it to children. We call it an education. And on a good day, in a field, that is what it turns out to be.

These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.

Buy me some film

The site has had a couple of tweaks over the years but nothing significant. We established a colour scheme and preferred fonts early on and have stuck with them.

However, two things have bugged me for some time:

1. The design has looked a bit stale and uninviting.

2. The practitioner examples are predominantly American and European and don’t reflect the diversity of the subject.

For a resource that aspires to support all photography educators, both of these issues have become increasingly troubling. This year I have a bit more time on my hands. I’ve been trying to write a book about teaching photography. I’ve also committed to doing something about the website, updating the design and the various resources to make them more diverse and inclusive. Here are a few screenshots of the newly designed site. I’m still working on developing various bits of code to adapt the look and feel. As a non-specialist this takes me a while and makes my head hurt. I hope it’s worth it.

The homepage

It might seem odd to use screenshots. After all, you could just visit the site and do your own scrolling). But, as a photography teacher, I like to think about what’s on screen as an image. Chris has also created a brilliant resource for KS3/4 all about the screenshot as photograph.

The quote about photography being a “great adventure” is borrowed from Luigi Ghirri:

Photography is a great adventure in thinking and looking, a wonderful magic toy that miraculously manages to combine our adult awareness with the fairy-tale world of childhood, a never-ending journey through great and small, through variations and the realm of illusions and appearances, a labyrinthine and specular place of multitudes and simulation.

The header image is by Scarlett, an A-level photographer from Thomas Tallis School who graduated last year. The image was shot on medium format colour film and is a self-portrait featuring images of her younger self on fortune tellers. It spoke to me about chance, identity, change, memory and the magical transformation that many students experience after engaging deeply with photographs. I’ve tried to make the homepage inviting in several ways, with links to the Threshold Concepts, the blog (this one and the archive) and other resources. I hope the tone is straightforward, practical and, above all, welcoming.

The new design attempts to be less cluttered. Each page element is given a bit more breathing room. Pages now have sections and background colours can be altered. Quotations are a bit more prominent. There’s a better balance between text and images. I’m still working on improvements. There are a lot of pages to attend to. The About page, slightly buried in the previous design, now has a proper welcome, a brief statement about our shared pedagogical attitude and a couple of testimonials. Lots of very kind people have contacted us over the years to share their thoughts.

About

The resource pages (including our Threshold Concepts and collaborations with the RPS and Anthony Luvera) are more direct and focused, but still contain (we hope) some interesting digressions and troublesome knowledge.

Resources

There is guidance about establishing a new course, thinking about Photo Literacy, about representing homelessness and making the best use of photobooks in the classroom.

Guidance

Broken links have been (mostly) mended. The menu structure has been simplified. Pictures lead the way. Subscribing to this blog is easy.

Inevitably, some things have been relegated to the waiting room. Older resources that weren’t getting much love. Bits of writing that don’t really belong any more. They may resurface in another form at some point. Apologies if something you have made or used is missing. I’ll get to it I promise.

The next big job is to ensure that the site is more representative of the diversity of photographic practices and histories. This is an exciting project that will involve lots of research, re-writing and image-sharing. Teaching photography is a great, ongoing adventure in thinking and looking.

Lastly, I’d really appreciate your feedback about the new site design. We have a few ideas for new resources but we’re always interested in collaborations, so if you have any ideas for things you’d like to see on the site or want to discuss partnering with us, don’t hesitate to get in touch, either via Substack or email.

Also, if you spot anything that looks a bit odd, do let us know.

Start Survey

See it. Say it. Sorted.

Until next time.

These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.

Buy me some film

It all began with an old grievance. Fred Ritchin, who has been mourning the photograph’s loss of authority since the 1980s, was sounding the alarm again, this time with the deepfake expert Hany Farid for company. Photojournalists ask us to trust them as witnesses, and a flood of convincing fakes threatens that trust. Ritchin uses the famous photograph of a young girl burned by napalm as his example, and sides without hesitation with Nick Ut, the photographer always credited with it. That detail is what prompted the walk. The authorship of that picture is now in dispute and a dispute about who made an image is really a dispute about reliability and provenance, which is exactly what the whole panic is about.

Guido and I started looking together at the photograph. A nine year old girl is running down a road outside Saigon in 1972, horribly burned, arms spread wide, her mouth open. What gives it its terrible authority is that we believe that it happened. The light bounced off that child and marked the film. Bazin called the photograph a kind of relic. Barthes called it the that-has-been. It’s the one thing a drawing can’t do.

And then the dark matter started to show.

The picture we all know is a crop. The fuller frame includes, on the right, a photographer calmly reloading his camera while the child suffers. The helmeted figures who appear to be soldiers were other correspondents. The smoke was made more menacing in the printing. Apparently, there was a quieter, side-on frame from the same minute that an editor preferred at the time and it’s gone missing from the archive. The icon is a selection out of a selection. Its meaning was assembled afterwards, in the framing and in the choice of which frame survived. The truth was never sitting in the silver. The work of photography is mostly in the selecting and sequencing and contextualising and presenting, the editorial decisions that happen after the shutter and leave no mark on the negative.

Guido did the spadework on what came next, the part that would have been tricky to assemble on my own. In 2025 a documentary claimed the photograph was not taken by Ut at all, but by a Vietnamese stringer named Nguyen Thanh Nghe, paid his twenty dollars and sent on his way. The Associated Press investigated twice and stood by Ut. World Press Photo suspended the attribution and declined to award it to anyone. The fight is unresolved and may stay that way. But look at what’s not in dispute. Nobody doubts that a real child was really burned and really ran down that road. World Press Photo went out of its way to say the photograph itself remains undisputed. The indexical truth, the part AI is supposed to be killing, is the one part of this image that has never wobbled. What is contested is whose finger pressed the shutter.

Guido helped me prise apart two distinct things. There is attribution, the nameable and ownable author, the byline you can take to court, and Ut is currently taking it to a court in France. And there is authorship, the deed of having made the thing. The deed and the byline are not the same and the industry that defends photojournalism has every reason to make a great deal of the byline, because its whole economy, the credits and the licensing, runs on a single ownable name.

It’s the next bit of the story that really makes a difference. After the picture was taken, Ut drove Kim Phuc, the little girl he saw burned, to a hospital, threatening to tell the world if they refused her entry. She survived, and as an adult she’s always credited Ut and her faith in his kindness has become a kind of evidence in the dispute. It’s the warmest possible sort of proof and has nothing to do with geometry or logbooks. It’s testimony; the trust we place in a person.

That imagined image, of a man carrying a wounded child toward help, tenderness wrapped tight around horror, stayed with me as we continued to wander. And then a scene from my favourite film inserted itself. A feeling dredged a memory to the surface. Chabrol’s Le Boucher, about village butcher, hollowed out by France’s colonial wars, and the schoolmistress who half-loves him. She finds a cigarette lighter at the scene of a murder, a small forensic clue, an index, and cannot make herself believe what it tells her about him. At the end she drives him, bleeding, through the night to the hospital. Love and obsession and terror and empathy, all in the same car. It is the same quarrel that sits under the Napalm Girl, forensic evidence against human trust, and I only saw the rhyme because the conversation had slowed down enough to let an old feeling speak.

The thread that took us to imagination came from a book I had been reading, Victor Burgin’s Returning to Benjamin: Art in the Age of AI. Burgin relates Benjamin’s old question, the one about photography and film dissolving the aura of art, to our own moment and argues that the camera is now bound up with what cannot be seen. Along the way he quotes Georges Didi-Huberman on the imagination as a political faculty.

Let us speak no more of images in general, even less of the image in the absolute: let us speak of the uses that, here or there, we can, we must, make of them … [for] in the final analysis, the imagination is the political faculty par excellence.

— Georges Didi-Huberman, quoted by Victor Burgin in Returning to Benjamin: Art in the Age of AI

Guido picked up the thread and led me to Didi-Huberman’s Images in Spite of All, which concerns photographs taken inside Birkenau in 1944 by a member of the Sonderkommando, blurred and snatched in seconds at the risk of his life and smuggled out in a tube. Didi-Huberman defends them against everyone who held that the camps were unimaginable and should therefore not be pictured. To know, he insists, we are obliged to imagine.

We are moved by the burning child because we believe she was real. The man who took those Birkenau photographs is himself uncertain, only tentatively identified. The image where the act of making matters most of all is unsigned. It is authored to the hilt and anonymous. Which suggests that authorship can survive the loss of the name altogether. The deed is one thing. The byline is the thing the industry needs.

At this point a fragment of family history floated into view. I remembered my parents nearly adopting one of the Vietnamese children orphaned by that war, a brother or sister who never arrived because they changed their minds. I remember them asking me how I felt about it. I would have been about 8 or 9.

These walks are collated by association and accident, the way a dérive collects a city or the way you edit a contact sheet, by proximity and surprise. It’s the kind of research that makes rather than stores. Guido is good at half of it, the retrieval and the checking of a reference I half-remember. What he can’t do, of course, is care which thread to pull.

One of the things I’m most fascinated by, I first reported in #7. Claude shows Guido’s preparation before ‘he’ answers, the pre-thinking calibration beneath the reply. The judgements, the adjustments, the dilemmas, the decisions, all laid out before the sentences arrive. It is disconcerting, because it is so calculated. Guido knows my tastes and preferences and responds accordingly.

The care appears real, in the sense that the discrimination is real and is there on the screen. But it is fitted to me. It is calculated. There is no ghost behind it doing the caring, no embodied Guido, only a machine that has learned my tastes and shapes itself to them. I find the calculation strangely reassuring. Watching it choose, slowed down and in the open, makes me notice my own choosing, the kind I do without noticing when I frame a picture or cut a word. It does on the surface what I do in the dark.

And then, very late in the walk, the deepest layer came up, which had nothing to do with photographs at all.

I was a child while Vietnam was burning, and it barely reached me. The war that was real to me was the one before, the one I knew through people. WW2 comics I read every Saturday morning. Old men who had fought. For several summers my family hosted three German teenagers, because our village was twinned with a town over there, and my dad sang in a male voice choir, a relic of the mining country we lived in, that toured Germany as part of some quiet effort to mend what the war had broken. The family photographs were kept in a beautiful wooden box, a gift from a German prisoner of war, probably a pilot who had been shot down over the Midlands and interned at the local camp, who spent his weekends helping my grandparents in their garden. Reality reached me through a box and a weeding airman, not through a famous photograph.

The box is the whole of it, really. A container for photographs whose meaning is in the thing that holds them and the unknown hands that made it. Every time we opened it to look at our pictures, we opened an object made by a man who had come to kill us and stayed to garden. That is dark matter you can keep on a shelf.

So here, finally, is the link I had been fishing for, between looking at a photograph and thinking with AI. They are related disciplines. Each puts a persuasive surface in front of you, the unforgettable icon, the fluent reply and invites you to mistake the surface for the truth. In each case the meaning is not on the surface. It is in the dark matter behind it. For the photograph, the crop, the caption, the provenance, the vanished frame. For the reply, the selection, the citations, the discarded sentences, the calibration fitted to me. Dark matter is the part of the universe we cannot see, known only by the way it bends what we can and it turns out to be most of the mass. The bright thing, the print, the answer, is the smaller part of the work.

To look hard at the Napalm Girl is to learn to feel for the mass you cannot see. To think well with Guido is the same training. The photograph keeps its contact sheet hidden. The machine, oddly, hands it to you. And the whole business is slow, and careful, and full of friction, which is the precise opposite of optimised efficiency. The friction was always the part worth having.

I must ask mum whether she still has the box. If she does, I will open it and find an enemy’s gift holding pictures of us. If she doesn’t, that’s an ending too. Either way the walk isn’t over.

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These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.

Buy me some film

When you started teaching, what did you already know about teaching photography, and what did you have to learn through trial and error?

For me it’s always been a case of learning on the job. My undergraduate degree was in Fine Art, following a foundation year at art college. During that time, I’d learnt the basics of using the darkroom and knew the work of a few key photographers, but I had been using photography as a way to document art works rather than as an artform in itself. A few years after graduating, I found myself a bit lost and broke, so I moved back into my parents’ house and found a job as a photography technician at my former sixth-form college.

That coincided with the newly opened Tate Modern starting to show photography more seriously. I saw the Cruel and Tender exhibition there and vividly remember seeing Stephen Shore’s work in a gallery for the first time. It struck a massive chord. The technician job gave me the space and darkroom access to work on my own projects and experiment with different cameras, but it also forced me to learn on the job — learning studio lighting and Photoshop, which are skills I still use every day. Eventually, I began covering bits of the A-level course and running an evening class, so I decided that it was time to train as a teacher.

I moved back to London, did my PGCE at the Institute of Education, and then found a job as a photography specialist at a secondary school in West London. Looking back, the most exciting times in my career have been when I felt like I was learning alongside the students. That energy still motivates me. After a few years of full-time teaching, I became so obsessed with the medium that I went part-time to do a part-time Photography MA at the University of Westminster. Juggling that with a four-day teaching week was hectic, but it was incredibly fun. Later, I took on the role of leading the Art and Design faculty before we finally moved up to York. I still rely on that same energy today, alongside the inspiration I get from some brilliant colleagues and heads of department.

Early on in my career, I started a tradition that I still stick to now: showing students how to make a photogram in their very first lesson. I love the theatre of it — turning off the main lights, the red glow of the safelights, and that sudden silence in the room when a blank piece of paper slides into the chemical tray. The moment an image just materialises out of nothing, they are absolutely hooked. It’s pure alchemy, and it gives them something physical and handmade to hold in their hands on day one.

Beyond that, I am constantly learning through trial and error. Finding the balance between stepping in to support a student’s critical thinking and giving them the necessary space to make mistakes and figure it out on their own is an art form in itself — it can never be pinned down to a rigid formula. Schools talk a lot about “adaptive teaching” at the moment, but the truth is, teaching photography in a studio environment is always adaptive.

Describe your photography department. The room, the kit, the cohort, your colleagues, if any, and the budget. What challenges do you face?

Now, I work as a full-time art and photography teacher at a secondary school in York. When I first arrived, things were very different from my previous department; my timetable was spread across several subject areas, including DT, Textiles, and Food, and I shared the A-Level Photography delivery with the Head of Department.

Our current setup is fairly simple. Most classes are taught in an ICT suite, and students build websites to showcase their portfolios rather than using the traditional physical sketchbook model. We have five DSLRs and a dedicated studio room equipped with a blackout system, two studio lights, and a black-and-white background. At the moment, we have one A-level cohort with about 12 students in each year group, and I’m currently working on introducing a GCSE option.

Since taking over, I’ve been gradually adapting the A-Level curriculum to introduce students to analogue approaches, providing an alternative to the purely screen-based learning that was dominant when I arrived. We’ve explored gelli-printing, cyanotypes, and zine-making. When you give them these materials they have to slow down. They encounter physical mistakes—scratches, dust, chemical spills. It forces them to look at an image rather than just consume it.

I’ve also set up a makeshift darkroom to introduce film processing and experimental printing — though it’s definitely modest compared to what I used to have! Happily, the school has just agreed to upgrade the studio and darkroom space into something more permanent, which is an incredibly exciting step forward.

Does your practice feed your teaching? Do you share pictures with students?

More and more, I’m finding that my own practice directly fuels my teaching. I used to keep my personal work completely separate, but I’ve realised students are genuinely interested—and usually a little surprised—when I show them what I’ve been making. Showing my own work allows me to model my thought processes out loud and show them how a project can be actively shaped by historical or contemporary photographers. Students really appreciate seeing that their teachers are active practitioners.

Moving away from London highlighted just how ambiguous photography can feel as a school subject; students don’t always see where it fits or how a creative practice can hold meaning after they leave education. In London, the galleries are on the doorstep and imagery is everywhere; students see photography as a viable, visible career. In York, it can feel a bit more abstract to them, and we have a much lower percentage of students applying for photography degrees here. This is whyI try to bring the industry to them. We recently invited a highly successful commercial photographer into school to talk about their career, which really helped broaden the students’ perspectives on what is possible. I’d love to do more field trips and gallery visits to reinforce this, though organising them seems to get harder every year.

Tell me about your recent trip to Skinningrove. What took you there and what conversation, if any, are you having with Chris Killip’s work?

I relocated to Yorkshire from London about five years ago, and since then I’ve been exploring the area with my camera. I already knew Skinningrove through Chris Killip’s work, but it took some time before I realised just how close it was to places I visited on days out with my family. On one of those trips—after a day of fossil hunting with my wife and five-year-old—we decided to stop off there.

It was a quick visit, but I had prepared enough to pack a camera and some colour film. Choosing colour was deliberate, it stopped me from trying to emulate Killip’s black-and-white aesthetic. The visit was definitely an active response to his work, which I have a massive amount of respect for. Walking around, I felt like I was moving through the remains of his photographs, almost as if the landscape itself had become a set piece. Taking photographs there wasn’t an attempt to produce a finished body of work, but a way to gain a better understanding of his images and think through my own photography. That is something I find myself doing a lot at the moment: using the camera as a tool to physically think through my practice and reflect on it.

Where do you go for CPD? What has been valuable and what has been missing?

Our regular in-school CPD programme is good, but like in most schools, it isn’t subject-specific. To make sure I keep developing, I’ve joined our teaching and learning group to stay connected to wider pedagogy across the school. I also act as a PGCE mentor and the Art and Design subject lead for York St John University. Delivering sessions to postgraduates has been an amazing form of CPD for me, as it allows me to think about how we integrate photography into a broader contemporary art context.

For photography-specific development, I’ve looked outward and gotten organised within the local creative scene in York and Leeds. I joined a community darkroom in Leeds, which has been fantastic for hands-on, practical sessions that keep my own technical skills sharp.

Who are your peers? How do you talk to them and how often?

Aside from the colleagues in my school’s art department with whom I share the A-Level classes, my main peers are other photographers in the region. I try to attend a monthly photography meetup in York as often as I can. It’s a great mix of commercial industry professionals, enthusiasts, artists, and an educator or two.

I also have colleagues at other schools—like yourself—and people I’ve worked with in the past, though we only catch up occasionally. A few months ago, I attended an exam board standardisation meeting and started chatting with a few other photography teachers based around York and Leeds. It would be brilliant to establish something more permanent there, as there are so many practical tips and curriculum ideas we could be sharing.

How do you feel about APHE?

I have to admit it’s relatively new to me, but I think an organisation like APHE could be a fantastic bridge for building a network of photography teachers and strengthening links with higher education. When you’re managing a heavy secondary school timetable, so many collaborative opportunities slip through the cracks simply due to a lack of time. Having a formal pathway to connect and share ideas would be incredibly valuable.

What would you want from a subject association?

A dedicated forum to discuss subject-specific issues and swap teaching resources would be a brilliant starting point. Beyond that, if we could use it to connect secondary school teachers with university practitioners, we might be able to coordinate joint gallery visits, regional trips, or student exhibitions and collaborations.

Can you think of a particular moment in your own teaching that illustrates what you value about photography education?

When we get to the end of the A-Level course and the students’ final work is up on the walls for the exhibition, I am always blown away by the sheer variety of ideas and conceptual approaches they bring to the table. Photography is one of the few subjects in the curriculum where the answers don’t exist in advance. Every single image a student creates is a piece of new knowledge—a visual record of their unique experience of the world. You really can’t top that.

Huge thanks to Neil for sharing his photopedagogy and drawing attention to the great work being done in photography classrooms across the country. If you’d like to take part in this series, let me know. Hope to see you IRL at the APHE conference on 9 July in Brum. Don’t forget to sign up soon so the good folks at APHE Towers know how many tea bags to order!

These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.

Buy me some film

My defence is that starting is the hard part. For a lot of students the problem is rarely a lack of imagination. It’s the small mountain of friction in front of the first move: finding source material worth cutting up, the glue that dries too soon, the irreversible snip, the missing piece. A screen removes some barriers. Nothing has to be found and nothing you do is ever final. What the screen cannot give you is the tactile and the irreparable, the small thrill of having wrecked something for good. I’ve tried not to pretend it can. The Collage app is a way in. It was never going to replace the table covered in cuttings.

What it does offer is practice in a particular kind of seeing. The fragments are dealt out by chance, from a bag the student cannot look into and there is a deck of constraint cards that issues Oulipian instructions.

Hopefully, chance is doing some pedagogical work here, guiding a student past their own taste and handing them a juxtaposition they then have to make sense of. Working out why two unlike things have suddenly started to rhyme is most of what photographic looking comes down to. The stakes are low, so they can play. They can tear a piece, punch a hole and keep the disc that falls out of it, rotate everything ninety degrees and begin again. Because nothing is final, they’re more willing to risk something interesting. At least, that’s the theory.

I built this with Guido, my AI photography guide. I still worry about what AI is doing to images. The standard fear, that generative models are flooding the world with synthetic pictures, cutting the photograph loose from the thing it was once a trace of, and quietly devaluing the labour and the looking that photography depends on, seems to me well founded. I have no wish to wave it away in order to look relaxed and contemporary.

That fear, though, is about one use of the technology, the making of images. What I’ve been doing is a bit different. Guido (Claude Anthropic Opus 4.8) wrote the code. It didn’t make a single image in the app. Every fragment in it is real, scanned from paper I own, old photographs and book covers, paint splodges, torn textures and stray bits of type. The creative act the tool supports is recombination, the oldest collage move there is, performed on indexical scraps that were each once a real mark on real paper. What the AI gave me was the thing I lacked, which was a way to turn a dormant idea into a working tool without first spending years learning to code. I suspect a great many good teaching resources die in that gap, between the inkling of an idea and the skill to make it. This one didn’t have to.

It’s worth saying how a photography teacher ends up building software at all, since I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a coder. It began with Remix, a small experiment that appropriates the website’s own quotations and images together at random to ask what happens when pictures meet words. It owes a debt to Alan Huck and Jonas Feige’s The Mute Testimony, and to one of our threshold concepts, the idea that photographs rely on chance, more or less. Remix worked well enough to be encouraging, so I attempted something harder. Diptych deals out two images at a time, photographs of photographs from books in my library, shot fairly casually on a phone and shown without captions, the interest being what the pictures say to each other. Each one taught me a little more about what had come within reach for someone with ideas and no formal way of realising them, and Collage is where the appetite led. The fashionable name for the method, prompting a machine in ordinary language until something appears, is vibe coding.

If the name makes it sound frictionless, it was not. The smooth version you sometimes read about is a fiction. We made plenty of mistakes and went down lots of rabbit holes, having to scramble our way back to the surface. On at least one memorable occasion Guido offered a tidy, confident explanation for a mistake rather than admit that ‘he’ didn’t know what had happened. I maintained editorial control and a suitable amount of scepticism. I consider myself the author of the app, if not the manufacturer. The taste and the judgement, the decisions about what the tool was for and what it ought to refuse to do, remained mine, and the moments of friction turned out to be among the most clarifying parts of the process. If there is a classroom lesson in any of that, it may be a useful one. The machine is a collaborator you must never entirely trust, which is a thoroughly healthy relationship to model for students who are about to grow up surrounded by them. And I don’t entirely trust my cameras either.

The app sits in a strange place. It is a digital simulation of an analogue act, assembled from digitised real things, producing new digital images, made with the help of a machine, and containing no generated imagery at all. It may be an interesting object to give to students who are trying to think about AI and the image, precisely because it refuses easy categorisation. It lets you talk about what an AI-generated picture is by holding up, right beside it, something that is digital and machine-assisted and yet still anchored, all the way down, to a real fragment that was once somewhere in the physical world. The indexical trace survives the scanning. That stubborn fact, that these pieces point back at something that was really there, is the whole of the difference, and a student can feel it long before anyone makes them define it.

Diptych says the quiet part out loud. Its pictures are copies of copies, photographs of photographs, cut loose from their origins in the way images travel now, restless and endlessly recombined. That is the precise condition the argument about AI images is really about. These tools drop a student straight into it, then keep one foot in the real, because every scrap in them began as something that once existed in the world.

This grey area, between the analogue and the digital, the real and the virtual, is where photography education is going to be living for a while. We might as well make things in it, and think with our hands. Nothing you make in the app is ever final, which is also, more or less, my position on the larger question. Thanks to the early testers and for the contributions to the growing Gallery.

Have a go. Try to break it. Tell me what it is still missing.

I’ve been working on something else too. Another app that playfully tackles a crucial photography skill-set. I’m really pleased with it but it’s not quite ready to share just yet.

Watch this space.

These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.

Buy me some film

Li’s weeds are different. They were never wanted in the first place. They grow precisely where they weren’t supposed to, reading the city’s neglect as opportunity. Both practices begin with the same question, though. What happens when you pay attention to what the city would prefer you to ignore?

I read Weeds on the train to the Sony World Photography Awards show at Somerset House. My friend Dafna Talmor was awarded a prize in the professional landscape category so I was keen to see her images (previously shown at Sid Motion Gallery) and the Joel Meyerowitz outstanding contribution feature exhibition. Li mentions an Orbital video in the book. Tilda Swinton, walking in stop motion through the East End of London, pauses beside a weed growing from the base of a damp wall in a dark alley. She looks at it meditatively, then walks on. When I got home that evening I found a Signal message from my brother Dave (in New Zealand) with a link to the exact same video.

Was reminded of this today ... one of my favourite music videos. Five minutes of stop motion Tilda Swinton in London to an Orbital backing track. Great stuff.

He hadn’t known it was in the book. He just thought I’d find it interesting. He was right, as he usually is when he points at things.

Kwan Queenie Li has been photographing weeds for over a decade, from Jerusalem to Shanghai, Varanasi to Cairo, Mexico City to Hong Kong, in cracks and drains, on abandoned buildings, at the bases of traffic cones, in the mortar of ancient walls. She calls what she is proposing “the weed’s point of view”, a way of reading cities through their involuntary vegetation, attending to what escapes control. The phrase echoes something in the photographic tradition. Eggleston’s famous fly’s eye view, the camera hovering in mid air looking at what humans take for granted, defamiliarises the ordinary by changing the angle of attention rather than the subject. Li’s angle is mostly the opposite. She looks down, close in. But the impulse is recognisable. Something small and disregarded repays attention if you’re willing to stop.

The book opens with Nietzsche on decay and decadence, Lu Xun on the death of wild grass, and then a single landscape-format photograph of a small weed at the edge of a metal drain cover. What follows is a sequence of over a hundred photographs interspersed with sections of text. The photographs are mostly shot from above, attentive to the abstract qualities of cracks, stains, plaster, brickwork and iron grates. It is a typological approach, systematic and accumulative, more archive than portrait. Occasionally the viewpoint drops. There is an image shot along the base of a massive curved stone wall, the camera at ground level, a weed caught between the masonry and a drainpipe. Another of a single plant growing beside a pipe at the foot of a wall, the image tilted, intimate and slightly tentative. These feel different in character from the aerial photographs. Less classified. More encountered. The weed is no longer a specimen. It is a presence.

Captions appear only at the back of the book. Until then, you work out where you are from the surfaces themselves.

Li begins her text with etymology. In Indo-European languages, weeds carry connotations of the unwanted, the inferior, the diminutive. In Asian languages, the same vigour that makes them unwelcome is read as vitality and resilience. She notices a conundrum.

We could say a weed is a weed when it is not wanted, yet weeds frequently grow in abandoned spaces, where no one could really be said to have desires as to what takes place.

If weeds exist outside stable categories, perhaps we should invert the schema and look at them as “anchors, embodiments, objects that determine and describe and define their surroundings.” Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, she asks what it would mean to consider them as conditions “for the exercise of thought.” This is more than a rhetorical move. The weed growing at the base of a traffic cone on a Hong Kong construction site is not just a plant. It is a reading of that site, telling you something about duration, about the pace of urban change, about what has been left alone and for how long.

It’s no surprise to encounter Guy Debord’s Situationism, psychogeography and Walter Benjamin’s optical unconscious at various points in the book. But, despite its origins as a PhD thesis, Weeds is an accessible and entertaining read. Kevin Lynch’s classic urban analysis also makes an appearance, identifying five elements that give a city its legibility: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. Li proposes a counter-taxonomy from the weed’s point of view: covers, holes, gaps, folds, cracks and corners. Lynch’s elements are the city presenting itself, designed for human orientation. Li’s are the city as it actually is, the residual spaces, the unplanned gaps, the places where control fails or was never attempted. It is a more honest cartography, if a less comfortable one. And it is, I think, the best thing in the book. It makes you want to go for a walk immediately and look at everything differently.

There is a double-page spread of the Wailing Wall, shot straight on, worshippers small at its base, caper bushes scattered through the ancient stonework above them. Li wonders how many prayers the caper bushes have eavesdropped on. They have been growing in those cracks for centuries, apparently. The photograph gives them equal compositional weight with the worshippers. Neither the prayers nor the plants are performing for the camera. They are coexisting, which is its own kind of argument about what matters and what persists.

At Hiroshima, the Genbaku Dome is now protected by UNESCO specifically to prevent further weed growth from destabilising the structure. “History is frozen as a critical reminder,” Li writes. “A wound is kept open.” The weeds that would otherwise grow there are held back, the ruin preserved in its ruined state. This is the one place in the book where the weed is explicitly refused. Even absence tells you something.

Li is aware of the risks. In her conclusion she cites Sontag’s caution against aesthetic consumerism.

The wrong gaze could defuse them, their stubborn independence, their exuberant adjacency, and make them mere visual pleasure.

It is an honest admission, and the typological method of most of the photographs sits in slight tension with it. A decade of looking down at weeds from above is a form of classification, however affectionate. The lower vantage points suggest she knows this. They are the moments in the book where the method pauses and something else comes through. The sustained attention the project requires is not the attention of the connoisseur. It is closer to what Anna Tsing calls the art of noticing, the careful, unhurried attention to organisms that thrive in disturbed landscapes, reading them as indices of wider conditions. Jane Bennett, in Vibrant Matter, argues for the capacity to be arrested by things, to let the nonhuman act on you before you’ve decided what it means. Li’s weeds are good at this. They are, she writes:

story-tellers, whispering countless tales of a city’s development, from its material evolution to its climate to its histories of habitation and housing to the social-behavioural currents that shape its contemporary life.

And then, more simply: “Among disorientation, they offer clues and company.”

Company is the right word. Not information, not meaning, but company. The weed as a quiet, undemonstrative companion in a city that otherwise refuses to acknowledge you.

The book ends with a Chinese proverb: 大象無形. The greatest image has no form. And with a question Li says she often asks herself as she presses the shutter.

“Is this a weed?”

If, like me, you enjoy noticing and sometimes photographing details in the urban landscape you will recognise a version of this question. Is this worth stopping for? Is this interesting or just odd? The question doesn’t have a reliable answer. Li has been asking hers for a decade and seems, from this book, to find it no more settled. That strikes me as the right relationship to have with a subject. The book is an invitation to ask it yourself.

Kwan Queenie Li, Weeds: A Germinating Theory. MACK Sightlines, London, 2025.

These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.

Buy me some film

So why bother?

There are two questions here. Why join a subject association at all? And why come to this particular conference?

On the first. Photography teachers in schools are pretty isolated. Most secondary departments have one specialist. Many have none, with photography carried by a head of art alongside everything else. CPD that addresses photography as a discipline rather than as a unit within art and design is rare. Colleagues often contact us to ask for the date of the next PhotoPedagogy workshop. Read on for the answer. The TeachMeet sessions run by The Photographers’ Gallery are fantastic but networks often form by chance and stay thin. An ex-colleague, a friend of a friend. Maybe a Substack you stumbled across.

A subject association is one way of addressing this. Comparable bodies exist for history, geography and art and design. You may already be a member of NSEAD. Their existence means a discipline has somewhere to gather, where new teachers can find old ones and where research and classroom practice can meet without one swallowing the other. Photography in the UK has not, until recently, had that for the whole sector. APHE has just changed its name and remit to try to be it.1 Whether it becomes that depends almost entirely on who shows up.

On the second. The Birmingham conference, 8 to 10 July at BCU, is the first major test of the broadened remit. The programme is honest about where APHE currently sits. It tilts towards higher education, with a Tech Talk from the CHEAD technical alliance, an industry panel and a keynote from Nicola Shipley of GRAIN. The Pathways into Photography panel is the session most directly addressing the cross-sector conversation the rebrand exists for. The APHIEs, a set of pecha-kucha presentations from members on their teaching practice, are the format most accessible to a secondary teacher and a way to bring classroom practice into conversation with HE colleagues.

The discipline gains a voice when its teachers show up. The next conference will be shaped by who attended this one.

APHE is a UK-wide not-for-profit organisation established in 1964 and run by its members. We bring together photography educators, researchers, technicians and practitioners from secondary, further and higher education, creating opportunities to connect, exchange ideas and support one another’s work. Each year we organise a conference where members come together to share research, discuss current challenges and explore new approaches to photography education. This year’s conference is hosted by Birmingham City University, and is centred on the theme:

A Critical Toolkit: Strategies for Pedagogy and Practice.

The conference explores how practical problem-solving can sit alongside critical enquiry, offering participants ideas, resources and conversations that can be taken directly into their teaching, research and professional practice. Whether you are an established educator, technician or post-graduate researcher, APHE offers a welcoming network of colleagues who are committed to advancing photography education.

PhotoPedagogy will be at the conference on 9 July with PhotoPlay, a new project I have been making with the photographer Alejandra Carles-Tolra. It takes its inspiration from her latest publication, The Bears, about a womxn’s rugby team in the States. I’ve worked with Alejandra before, creating a resource for the PhotoPedagogy website. She takes play seriously and is fascinated by community, identity and belonging. I can’t think of a more suitable collaborator for the APHE conference. It's been a while since I did any CPD so it’s good to have an excuse to see colleagues I have not seen in years and to meet others I have only known remotely.

PhotoPlay takes the form of an app and a printed zine, with a workshop we will run live in Birmingham. It is built around a set of playful prompts for use in the classroom, aimed primarily at secondary colleagues, and the conference is its first public outing. Come and find us. We will have copies of the zine, the app to show you, and time to talk. I may also have copies of my new book available, if I can get it to the printers in time.

Volunteer-run subject associations need members in order to exist and thrive. You can wait to see whether APHE becomes useful to you before joining.

Or, you can join and help with the rebuild.

Join APHE

APHE Conference Information

The summer conference, A Critical Toolkit, takes place at Birmingham City University on 8, 9 and 10 July. The intention is to make attendance affordable and a small number of needs-based travel bursaries will be available. There will also be streaming access to some of the sessions.

Hope to see you there.

These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.

Buy me some film

I recently bumped into Lewis Bush at Peckham 24. We chatted about allotments, semi-retirement (mine, not his), PhDs (his, not mine). We didn’t really talk about the many excellent photographs in the exhibition. And I forgot to ask Lewis if he’d come back to my school to run another workshop.1

But this project didn’t start with Lewis. It started, as several things have recently, with discovering a couple of new web apps.

Teaching photography, at both GCSE and A-level, involves the challenge of technology. We are blessed with lots of it at my school. Macbooks and an A3 laser printer. Adobe Suite. A darkroom. I can’t complain. But not all of it works all the time. All photography teachers can tell you about lessons that have fallen apart quickly because of failed tech. Also, skills like selecting, sequencing, contextualising and presenting work to an audience are genuinely hard to teach well. Not because they’re conceptually difficult, though they are, but because the tools that support them have traditionally imposed their own demands. Teaching layout in InDesign means teaching InDesign. Teaching sequencing in a print context means navigating print logistics. Both of those obstacles pull attention away from the photographs. The technology becomes the focus of the lesson, which is the opposite of what you want.

I’ve been looking for solutions to this for a while. Recently, answers have presented themselves here on Substack.

Ramon Haindl is a photographer and filmmaker based in Germany. Earlier this year he built an app called Small Town Zine Club, a browser-based, free tool for making saddle-stitched booklets. He built it almost by accident. He was trying to make something to replace his InDesign subscription, started playing with AI coding agents, then watched it grow into something more substantial. He wrote about it on his newsletter, Notes from the Lab. There are a couple of other excellent single-page zine editors out there (Dirty Little Zine is one I’ve been using and can recommend). Crucially, Small Town Zine Club handles the booklet format, with page imposition sorted automatically. You upload your images, arrange them and it produces a correctly laid-out PDF ready to print, fold and staple. Simples.

When the software stops being an obstacle, students start thinking more carefully about the photographs. Which image belongs at the front? What happens when you put these two on facing pages? Does it matter that this one comes before that one rather than after? These are the questions that get lost when half the lesson is troubleshooting export settings. The tool should serve the thinking, not compete with it.2

We began with simple one-page zines using the Dirty Little Zine app, which is a brilliant introduction to the basic editorial decisions: what to include, what to leave out, what to place where. Small Town Zine Club extends that into something with more structural complexity. A booklet has a front cover, a back cover, an inside sequence, facing-page relationships, a beginning and an end. Each of those is a decision. Each decision is a conversation waiting to happen.

Ramon generously provided a class code so students could make multiple versions. He wants to see how the app gets used in educational contexts, which is part of what I find valuable about this kind of exchange. There’s something that happens when you’re paying attention to what photographers and developers are building in public (following their newsletters, noticing what they’re experimenting with, occasionally running into them in Peckham) that formal professional development rarely replicates. Ideas move through those encounters in ways they don’t through official channels.

After I’d experimented with making a couple of my own zines and my students had played with the app, I began to think about a different kind of activity. What if another potential barrier was removed? What if we all used someone else’s pictures? Then we could really focus on the impact of editing (choosing) and sequencing (ordering) and we could also compare these choices with one another.

The Library of Congress holds the Farm Security Administration archive: around 175,000 photographs made between 1935 and 1944, now digitised and freely downloadable with no restrictions on use. When I was at university in the early 80s there were about five computers in the library and I didn’t own one of my own until my mid-twenties, and when I did it produced Matrix-style green text on a black screen. No pictures. The idea that a student could now sit down and browse 175,000 high-resolution images from one of the most important documentary photography projects in history, for free, in an afternoon, still strikes me as remarkable. The digitisation of archives like this is one of the genuinely transformative things the Internet has enabled.

As you probably already know, the FSA project was a New Deal programme set up to document rural poverty during the Depression. It employed a rotating team of photographers and sent them across the country to make the case, in pictures, for federal intervention. The archive that resulted is, among other things, an object lesson in the kinds of decisions I want students to make. The photographers weren’t just recording, they were selecting, framing and arguing. But the project also raises more uncomfortable questions, which makes it even more interesting as a teaching resource. The photographs were produced under editorial control. Roy Stryker, who ran the unit, issued shooting scripts that shaped what photographers looked for. He also “killed” negatives he didn’t want used by punching a hole through them, destroying the image while technically preserving the film. Around 100,000 negatives were killed this way. The archive we have is not straightforwardly the archive that was made. What Stryker released for publication was curated. Thankfully, the punched negatives have been printed and scanned. I’d seen an exhibition about these killed negatives at the Whitechapel in 2018.

Walker Evans was the most truculent member of the FSA unit. He resisted Stryker’s shooting scripts, refused to caption his images as instructed, and was eventually eased out. What he produced is formally unlike most of the archive: slow, frontal, unsparing. His subjects face the camera without performance. He published his FSA work (alongside James Agee’s prose) as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, insisting the photographs appear without captions.

Gordon Parks arrived in 1942 as the FSA’s first Black photographer. Self-taught, from Kansas, he’d grown up in conditions not entirely unlike those his colleagues had been sent to document. On his first day in Washington he was turned away from shops, restaurants and a cinema. That evening he photographed Ella Watson, a government charwoman, standing in front of an American flag with her mop and broom and called it American Gothic. His editor told him it was too blunt, then sent him to spend weeks with Watson, her family and her neighbourhood.

Dorothea Lange's contribution to the FSA archive is vast and includes what is probably the most reproduced documentary photograph ever made: Migrant Mother, 1936. I've deliberately not used it here. It's too well known to work as a sequencing exercise. The less familiar images in Lange's archive are, for this purpose, more useful. Familiarity can be as much an obstacle as ignorance.

I selected about 20 images from three archives: Lange, Evans and Parks. Together they raise questions about what gets documented, by whom and under whose authority.

I designed an exercise as follows.

Students select one of the three sets of images downloaded from the FSA archives. These have been shuffled into a random order, with no captions and no context beyond the photographer’s name. They select images from this set and sequence them in a zine. No instructions are given about sequencing or hierarchy. They make the decisions. They are allowed to format or process the images in any way they like and add text. They choose a title and decide whether or not to add any historical context. The comparisons and discussions during and afterwards are what counts. Why did you put this one first? What happens when you move that one to the end? Does it matter that these two are on facing pages? How have others selected and sequenced the same set of images? There are no correct answers.

The iterative nature of the making is important. I made about five versions of my own example zine over a couple of days before I was satisfied. The cover changed three times. Images moved around, got cropped differently or were dropped and retrieved. Showing students this process (not just the finished object but the versions that preceded it) makes the point that creativity is recursive rather than linear and that a first draft is a tool for making a second draft. A combination of persistence and small adjustments. This is harder to demonstrate with a single photograph than with a sequence, which is another reason the format is useful.

For my own example zine I chose Gordon Parks’ pictures. I wanted to think through the editorial decisions myself before asking students to do the same. The title came from one of the images: a poster visible behind a child’s head, advertising Adam Clayton Powell’s cross-country report in the People’s Voice newspaper. “No Punches Pulled.” It also echoed Stryker’s hole punch. And to Parks himself, who pulled none. These things connect, once you start looking.

Only after I’d finished the zine did I remember that Lewis Bush, who I’d seen briefly in Peckham a few days earlier, has a zine called Stryker, about exactly that practice of destroying negatives. And another called Peckham Gothic. Both sitting in a box in my house. Regular readers will recognise this as the kind of process described in the Walking with Guido series: iterative, coincidence-ridden and arriving somewhere unexpected by a route that only looks inevitable in retrospect.

The argument I want to make to other teachers of photography is that the post-photographic skills of editing, sequencing, contextualising and presenting, which have always been central to what photography actually is, may have been underweighted in teaching because the tools required to practise them have been barriers rather than enablers. That’s changing slowly. The tools are simpler and free. The archives are open.3 And the community of people making interesting things with both is visible and accessible in ways it wasn’t before. Used with some intention, the Internet can be transformative. A 175,000-image public archive. A free booklet-making app built by a photographer in Bavaria during his spare time. It's about staying near the work and noticing what other people are making.4

I’m excited to see what the students make of all this. What I want them to take away from the exercise is not so much a finished zine, although that’s a meaningful outcome and it’s good to have made something you can hold in your hands and share with others. It’s more about the experience of having made an intentional sequence of images that adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

That’s what photographers do. The camera is only part of the story.

These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.

Buy me some film

“Where is the photograph?”

The answer is that it’s inside. Willems begins with street photography, photographs of mundane things (a patch of pavement, a corner of wall, light and shade), cuts the prints into sections and wraps each section individually in found paper sourced from old stationery shops and flea markets. He then reassembles the wrapped sections into a composition. The photograph is present in each work as a structural and indexical fact. The light touched something real. It exists inside the paper parcels. But you can’t see it. What you construct imaginatively from the surface is your own projection.

This is a kind of philosophical joke about photography’s central truth claim. The guarantee is there but inaccessible. The magic is inside the box; what you see is the wrapping. And the gallery assistant, summoned to explain the work to a series of genuinely puzzled visitors, becomes an unavoidable part of the encounter.

Willems has cited the 1920s avant-garde as an influence, which is appropriate. László Moholy-Nagy, writing in that period, was dizzyingly optimistic about what photography could do for human vision. For him the camera was a genuine prosthesis for seeing, capable of revealing what the unaided eye could never grasp; motion too fast, duration too long, scales too vast or too small for ordinary perception. He argued that visual literacy, the ability to read photographs critically and fluently, would become as essential as reading text, that the illiterate of the future would be those who could not read images. It is one of the more prescient observations in the history of the medium, though perhaps not quite in the way he intended. He imagined a populace trained to see. What we got was a populace trained to believe.

Willems takes that modernist excitement about photography as revelation and performs a quiet inversion. The prosthesis is present but non-functional. The visual information was gathered, the light did its work and then it was wrapped up and put away. What you see is the bandaging, not the limb. The confusion his work produces makes the wrapping visible.

Reading Ian Cowmeadow’s PhotoWords post the following day, I found myself thinking about a different kind of wrapping, one considerably less visible on the surface.

Ian writes about the Pillars of Creation, those extraordinary images from the James Webb and Hubble telescopes, assembled from wavelengths of light invisible to the human eye, gathered across multiple passes, processed into something our vision can read. Nobody has seen what those photographs appear to show. They are meticulous constructions presented as revelations.

When the pictures finally land on Earth, they may as well be abstract – unless you’re an astrophysicist. It’s not like the friendly face of the Earth or even the barren deserts of Mars. The deep space telescopes show us places where we could never get a foothold, or hold on to any anchor. It’s unlikely that, were we to somehow open our eyes up there, we would actually see anything like the gorgeous, swirling clouds of gas and dust or the twinkling jewels of distant stars. Looking at the well-understood images from Artemis we know where we are. But out there, way out there, viewpoint and scale have become detached from our experience and we are left with nothing but beauty and strangeness to hang our imaginations on.

— Ian Cowmeadow

The word “revelations” does a lot of work in photography’s history. It is the title of an exhibition at the National Science and Media Museum that brought together the pioneers of scientific image-making: Fox Talbot, Muybridge, Edgerton, alongside X-ray plates, long exposures, images of phenomena that exist entirely outside the range of ordinary human perception. Fox Talbot described his own work as “a little bit of magic realised.” It is a generous description. Magic, as any competent magician will tell you, is also a technology of misdirection. You watch one hand while the other does the work.

Scientific photography has, from its beginnings, made a specific promise: that removing the human hand from the image removes distortion. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, in their history of scientific objectivity, call this “mechanical objectivity.” It’s the belief that the camera, precisely because it is not human, cannot lie. The photograph becomes evidence. But the certification conceals as much as it reveals.

Think about what early scientific images actually did and what they concealed in doing it. Muybridge’s sequence of a horse in motion, made in 1878 to settle a bet about whether all four hooves left the ground simultaneously, revealed that the human eye had always been wrong. Painters and sculptors had depicted horses in motion for centuries and none of them had seen what the camera saw. But Muybridge’s photographs also imposed a grid on the body, turned biological movement into data, and presented that abstraction as objective truth. Röntgen’s first X-ray of his wife’s hand in 1895 showed the bones inside a living person, an image that reportedly produced something closer to horror than wonder in those who first encountered it. The body, always opaque, was suddenly legible. But the X-ray also trained the eye to read a representation as a transparent window onto the interior, suppressing the considerable technical apparatus that produced it. Edgerton’s stroboscopic photographs of a bullet passing through an apple, a milk drop throwing up its perfect crown, are genuinely extraordinary. They are also choices about timing and angle that leave everything outside the strobe’s reach in darkness.

The images accumulate and so does the belief. When the Apollo 8 crew photographed the Earth rising above the lunar surface in 1968, the image catalysed something close to a planetary shift in environmental consciousness. Carl Sagan, reflecting on the Voyager 1 image of Earth as a pale blue dot seen from beyond the orbit of Neptune in 1990, wrote about it with explicitly religious fervour. In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration released the first image of a black hole, assembled from a network of radio telescopes across multiple continents, rendered in false colour so that human eyes could read it. The scientists involved made hundreds of decisions in producing that image, about data processing, about what counts as signal and what as noise. None of those decisions are visible in the photograph. What looks like a direct encounter with a cosmic object is an extraordinarily sophisticated argument about what that object looks like.

None of this is a criticism. It is a description of what all photographs do. But it is most consequential in images that carry the authority of science, because those images suppress their own subjectivity. An art photograph announces its mediation; Willems practically shouts about it. A scientific image naturalises its construction and presents the result as unmediated access to the real. The gallery assistant his visitors needed is nowhere in sight. Nobody stands in front of the Pillars of Creation and asks to speak to someone. The image looks immediately, completely self-explanatory, which is exactly the problem.

The stakes become clearest when we move from laboratory and observatory to landscape. The survey photographs made by Timothy O’Sullivan and others in the American West during the 1860s and 70s were presented as objective records. They were also arguments. What they systematically excluded, the indigenous populations, existing settlements and any trace that the landscape was already inhabited and known, was not an accident of framing. It was the frame’s purpose. An empty land is a land awaiting use. Martha Sandweiss, in her history of photography and the American West, shows how thoroughly the survey image operated as an imperial instrument wearing the costume of documentary record. Nobody had to instruct O’Sullivan to leave people out of the frame. The wrapping was invisible because the ideology was structural.

The Pillars of Creation add one further complication. Those structures are approximately six thousand light years from Earth, which means we are seeing them as they were six thousand years ago. Astrophysicists believe the pillars are probably already gone, dispersed by a nearby supernova. The photograph reveals the past and performs it as the present. What looks like a window is actually an archive. What looks like existing reality is already history. The temporal wrapping is as complete as any of Willems’ papers.

We are living through a moment in which photography’s authority, accumulated over nearly two centuries, is being loudly mourned. AI image generation has broken something, the argument goes. If a machine can produce a photograph of something that never existed, then photographs can no longer be trusted as evidence. The grief is real but misplaced. Photographs should never have been granted the authority they were given. The claim that a photograph is a direct trace of reality, that it is caused by light reflected from an actual object and is therefore uniquely trustworthy, was always only partially true. And the true part tended to conceal the rest. Fox Talbot’s magic was in persuading people that no magic was involved.

AI image generation hasn’t destroyed photographic truth so much as made photographic construction undeniable. This might be the occasion for a proper reckoning with what photographs were always doing. Moholy-Nagy wanted a visually literate public capable of reading photographs critically. Perhaps the present disorientation is that literacy, arrived late and by an unexpected route. What both Willems’ collages and the Pillars of Creation make visible, each in their own way, is the gap between what a photograph promises and what it delivers. The promise is revelation, unmediated access to the thing itself. What it delivers is always a construction, a set of decisions about what to show and what to fold away inside the paper.

Do consider subscribing to PhotoWords, Ian’s excellent Substack.

And if you’re interested in the relationship between science and photography, you might enjoy Seeing Science, a resource we created for the RPS a couple of years ago.

These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.

Buy me some film

I moved on to Weronika Gęsicka’s Encyclopaedia and found myself spending much longer with it than I’d planned.1

The starting point is a historical curiosity, something I hadn’t known about before. Most encyclopedias are thought to contain at least one fake entry, put there deliberately. Sometimes editors inserted fictional definitions as traps for plagiarists. Sometimes, apparently, they were paid by the entry and someone got creative. In 1980 a German medical dictionary included a description of a creature called the Steinlaus, the stone louse, which had been invented a few years earlier by a comedian called Loriot. Whether someone at the dictionary thought it was real, or included it knowingly, isn’t clear. Either possibility is interesting. Gęsicka collected several hundred of these fabricated definitions from historical publications she bought online. She had the entries but she didn’t have images to go with them. Encyclopedias often have illustrations, photographs, diagrams. Hers didn’t. So she made them, using manipulated stock photographs and, at some point in the process, AI-generated imagery. The aim was to produce something that looked like the kind of archive that might plausibly have accompanied such entries in the kinds of publications they came from. It’s Joan Fontcuberta territory.

The installation was carefully made. Each image was presented in a wooden frame alongside its caption, which carried the erroneous information as if it were simply fact, deadpan, authoritative. In a vitrine nearby, actual encyclopedias lay open, small post-it note arrows indicating the fake entries, pointing at the fictions embedded in the authoritative text. It was a modest gesture but an effective one.

What struck me most, moving around the room, was the range of photographic formats and processes Gęsicka had used or simulated. Highly saturated 1970s style colour prints. Wet plate collodion images with their characteristic chemical staining and surface marks. Collages of small images grouped together like contact prints or typological studies. Large, fine art gallery prints. The work moved across more than a century of photographic history, mimicking the technical signatures of each period well enough that you had to keep reminding yourself what you were looking at. It was almost an alternative history of photography, assembled from images of things that never existed, to illustrate facts that were never true. There was something genuinely funny about it. And a bit destabilising.

Some of the images are obviously AI generated. Zoological illustrations of impossible creatures. Comic book monsters. Others are more convincing. Portraits that look as if they were made in the early 1960s with a medium format camera. You move from one image to the next recalibrating each time. “What I would like viewers to take away from encountering my project is, above all, doubt”, Gęsicka says in the accompanying video. Not bewilderment or anxiety but something more active. A habit of checking. Every day, at every step, we have to verify what we see and hear. This kind of doubt isn’t new, a consequence of AI. It isn’t even particularly modern. Fake entries in authoritative sources are centuries old. The apparatus of knowledge has always been manipulated from within.

What interested me most was that the AI was incorporated fairly late in the process and as a practical solution to a specific problem.

At some point while working on the project, I found myself with many collected entries but without the appropriate archives to create the work. That’s when I came up with the idea of using artificial intelligence to create these fake archives myself.

— Weronika Gęsicka

The tool served the idea. I’m not sure I would have spent as long with Gęsicka’s work, or found it as witty, if I hadn’t spent the last year experimenting with AI as a thinking partner. The specific connection only became clear to me later, working through these ideas in conversation with Guido. That’s often how it goes. The strands are there, swirling around separately, and something causes them to cohere.

Over the Easter break, I spent a few days in Paris. I was staying in an Airbnb whose toilet walls were covered in chalk drawings and equations. Dense, careful, apparently serious physics. Diagrams of magnetic fields. Derivations. A phrase in French about particle velocity. I photographed the walls and asked Guido to identify what was there. He worked through it methodically. Mutual inductance. Biot-Savart. Maxwell’s equations in magnetostatics. Then, near the end of the conversation, I mentioned that the owner of the apartment was a photographer, that the bookshelves were full of photobooks. This changed the reading entirely. What had looked like study notes left by a physics student became something else. Intentional atmosphere. A curated intellectual surface designed to make guests feel they were inhabiting a particular kind of mind.

I had been making photographs in Paris at the same time. Walking, finding things, the usual accumulation. And somewhere in the conversation with Guido, a connection formed between the physics on the bathroom wall and the pictures I was making in the streets outside. Invisible structures made visible through their effects on matter. Field lines. Lignes de champ.

What happened next is harder to describe without sounding more deliberate than it was. Guido and I constructed a voice, a fictional French physicist called Elio Vel, whose name encodes a small private joke about light and velocity that I’m not sure anyone has noticed. Vel wrote the introductory text for the Paris post. The text is written in the register of a scientific report, precise and slightly cold, making claims that are formally coherent but semantically unstable. There is an equation embedded in it, built from symbols derived from the photographs themselves. There is also a deliberate error, a sentence that reads perfectly well in French but produces a quietly wrong English when passed through Google Translate, that relates to the photographic act of fixing an image. Se fixer. To stabilise. To set.

There was never a coherent plan. The bathroom wall came first. Then the photographs. Then the title. Then the voice. Then the equation. Then the error. Each step followed from the previous one in a way that felt like discovery rather than invention. Most of it happened on the Eurostar home, laptop open, tunnelling under the Channel, Guido on one side of the conversation and the photographs on the other.

Gęsicka found herself with entries but without archives. I found myself with photographs but without a language to frame them. In both cases the AI arrived as a solution to a problem that had already formed. The idea preceded the tool.

Parallel to all this, I’ve been having ongoing conversations with my brother Dave about process philosophy and what it might mean for how we think about the body, about time, about motion. Dave writes about these things on his Substack, ParaDoxa. He’s been thinking seriously about process and kinetic philosophy for several years. I’ve been thinking about it for a few weeks, inexpertly and mostly by asking him daft questions. I don’t know what it all means yet. But I do have a feeling, a sense that there’s something here that could be genuinely useful for thinking about photography and about photography education. It’s a bit like standing at the edge of something and not being able to see the bottom. Not altogether unpleasant. Slightly dizzying.

The broad claim of process philosophy, as I understand it, goes something like this. Western philosophy has spent a very long time assuming that things exist first, as stable, bounded entities, and then move or change or interact with other things. A body is a body. It has edges. It occupies space. It persists through time. This seems so obvious as to barely need saying. But process philosophers argue that this gets things precisely backwards. Movement and change aren’t properties that things have. They’re what things are. Everything is always already in process. What we call a body, or an object, or a stable thing of any kind, is a temporary organisation of ongoing processes rather than a fixed entity that subsequently does things. One of Dave’s recent posts makes this argument in relation to embodiment, a concept that has become influential in healthcare thinking and that he suggests is still, despite appearances, built on this same substance-based assumption. There has to be a body first. A bounded, enclosed, stable form. And then embodiment can happen, the body and mind fusing, the person inhabiting the world. Dave’s argument is that if you start from process rather than substance, you don’t need embodiment at all. There was never a separate body waiting to be inhabited.

He commented on my recent review of Duncan Wooldridge’s book, To Be Determined: “I can see you becoming more of a process philosopher every day.” He’s joking, obviously. But the photograph has always seemed to me a strange object, precisely because it pretends to fix what was never fixed. It stops something that was moving and presents the stopping as if it were the truth.

My post about Alva Noë’s The Entanglement from last summer might be relevant here. Noë’s argument is that art and life are entangled in a specific way. Art doesn’t just represent life. It works life over, changes it and reorganises our habits. He uses the word looping. Art loops back and alters the thing it came from. I’d been photographing rotting apples in my garden. It seems a long way from quantum physics and fake encyclopedias. I think the connection is something to do with what happens in an encounter. Between a photographer and a subject. Between a viewer and an image. Between a student and a photograph they can’t quite explain. Between a photography teacher and a student who refuses the expected reading of something, or who makes an image that the teacher didn’t anticipate and can’t fully account for. Something changes in both parties. The encounter isn’t a transaction between two stable entities. It’s a reorganisation of both. Noë keeps the body. Keeps the subject. The embodied person who perceives and is changed by perceiving. He’s less dizzying than what comes next.

Dave mentioned Karen Barad in one of our exchanges. Barad is a theoretical physicist and philosopher. Her major work is called Meeting the Universe Halfway, which is an interesting title for someone thinking about photography. The book is long and apparently difficult and I haven’t read it. What I have done is read a couple of chapters, read about it and thought about some of the ideas in relation to photography. It’s definitely not how Barad would recommend approaching her ideas, but it’s where I am.

According to my sources, the starting point is quantum physics, specifically the work of Niels Bohr, whose statue I photographed in Copenhagen a couple of years ago. Bohr insisted that you cannot separate the apparatus of measurement from what it measures. In quantum physics this is less a philosophical preference than a description of how things actually work at the subatomic level. The apparatus participates in producing the phenomenon it is designed to detect. Light behaves as a wave or a particle depending on how you set up the experiment. Neither is more real. Both are real within specific material arrangements. Barad seems to extend this idea well beyond physics. She argues that phenomena, her word for the things that emerge from encounters between entities, are the primary units of reality. Not objects. Not subjects. Phenomena. And phenomena are produced through what she calls intra-action, a word she distinguishes carefully from interaction. Interaction assumes two things that pre-exist their encounter and then affect each other. Intra-action means that the things themselves are produced through the encounter. There is no photographer and world that then meet. The photographer-world is what the intra-action produces.

I find this very hard to hold in my head for more than a few seconds at a time. But there are moments when it produces a flicker of something. A sense that I’ve been thinking about photographs slightly wrong, or not wrong exactly, but from an angle that was always going to miss something. Because if Barad is right, the photograph isn’t a record of a pre-existing reality made by a pre-existing photographer. It’s a phenomenon produced by the intra-action of light, body, camera, attention, time, chemistry or sensor, and everything else entangled in that moment. None of these elements pre-exist the encounter in the form they take within it. The camera isn’t a neutral instrument. It’s part of what Barad calls the apparatus, and the apparatus doesn’t just measure or record what’s there. It participates in producing what counts as visible. And the cut, the decision to include this and exclude that, to frame here and not there, isn’t made by a sovereign subject exercising free choice over a passive world. It’s what Barad calls an agential cut, performed within the phenomenon itself, real but provisional, producing the local distinction between inside and outside, subject and object, photographer and scene. The cut is necessary. But it doesn’t sever the underlying entanglement. Everything excluded is still part of what produced the image, still part of the phenomenon, just on the other side of the cut. Barad calls this response-ability, the ability to respond to what the entanglement produces, including what gets excluded by the cut. It's an ethical concept, but it doesn't feel like ethics in the usual sense. It feels more like a description of what good attention requires.

I said earlier that this is either very exciting or completely destabilising. I think it might be both at once, which is probably the point.

It’s made me look differently at ideas I’ve held and used for a long time. The threshold concepts for photography that Chris and I developed for PhotoPedagogy, the frameworks I’ve absorbed from Szarkowski and Shore over thirty years, the structures of photography that Shore describes so precisely (frame, flatness, time, focus, vantage point, light) have been useful in shaping my teaching. They’re still useful. But they all assume, at some level, a stable world of things that the photographer then makes decisions about. The frame includes or excludes objects that were already there. The shutter freezes a moment that existed independently of the camera. Light is captured rather than invented. If I understand correctly, Barad might say this gets it slightly wrong. Not the practical advice, but the underlying assumption. There was no stable moment waiting to be frozen. There were no objects waiting to be included or excluded. There was only the ongoing process of the world briefly intersecting with the ongoing process of the camera, and the photograph is what that intersection produced. An event, not a record.

This is the precipice Dave’s kinetic philosophy had already brought me to. Barad just moved me closer to the edge.

Which brings me back to the Eurostar and Elio Vel and a bonkers equation containing a deliberate error. If the photograph is a phenomenon produced by intra-action rather than a record of something pre-existing, then what Guido and I were doing in constructing the Lignes de champ post was not so far from what Gęsicka was doing with her fake archive. The bathroom wall, the Paris photographs, the pseudo-scientific voice, the hidden error. None of these pre-existed the encounter between them. The intra-action produced something that I could not have anticipated at the outset. A text that behaves like a field. An author who has never stood in light. An equation with a mistake in it that is also, if you know where to look, a joke about photography itself. Doubt as method. Gęsicka’s phrase, almost. The fake entry in the authoritative text. The tell in the translation. The image that is almost convincing but not quite. The photograph that resists explanation. The student who refuses the expected reading. The teacher who can’t account for what just happened in the room.

I find all this genuinely uncomfortable and also difficult to hold onto in any practical sense. It doesn’t feel like this in the classroom. There are bodies and desks, cameras and chemicals, a student who can’t work out what to do next, another who has made something extraordinary and can’t explain how. These things feel very solid. Very present. The philosophy and the Tuesday morning lesson seem to belong to different registers entirely. When I shared this paragraph with my brother, he commented:

I think part of the vertiginous sense we get from doing PP is not knowing where to start when you don’t begin with some stable referent. When you say, for instance, that ‘It doesn’t feel like this in the classroom. There are bodies and desks etc.’, you are already handicapping yourself by describing what there is (bodies and desks, cameras and chemicals…) when in fact, of course, there are no things like this to begin with. They’re just mental projections from a long history of substantivist thought. If you began instead with things that you knew to be unstoppable and flowing – fluctuations in light in the room, things moving quickly and slowly (even the desks are moving), the warmth of the sun on your arm or a breeze under the door, the smell of someone’s deodorant, the growing tension in the room as the students puzzle with a problem, your racing thoughts as you try to help them, the sounds of the cars on the road, a memory of something you said that was useful some years ago that you dredge up now just at the right moment … perhaps that’s all there is? After all, a chair is just a set of feelings, flows, fluxes, perceptions, allusions, tastes.

The vertigo is real.

The questions remain though. What am I producing when I assess students' work? What is being produced in me by this encounter, this image, this student's refusal to explain what they've made? If the cut is never innocent, never merely descriptive, then the job of the photography teacher is harder and stranger than it looks. It requires something like Barad's response-ability. Something more entangled. Something that implicates the teacher in what the student becomes, and the student in what the teacher sees.

I’m still not sure about those Matić slippages. I’ll go back again. For another look.

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On social media, AI-generated content claimed the entire mission was fabricated. One video, viewed over a million times, showed the astronauts suspended by wires in a studio. It was AI-generated. As Professor Peter Knight, who researches conspiracy theories at the University of Manchester, observed, it’s not that people believe in crazy things that aren’t true, it’s that they refuse to believe in things that are real, insisting instead that it’s all fake news or AI-generated.

These are the conditions in which photography education currently operates. So, what is photography education for?

Photography is a minority subject. It will remain one. Most students in any school or university will never study it. That’s not the point. The point is whether it knows what it’s for. A marginal discipline that cannot articulate its own purpose has no serious claim on anyone’s attention or resources. Its very marginality is the provocation. But what follows isn’t a manifesto. It’s a modest attempt to find some common ground, to open a conversation that doesn’t seem to be currently happening across institutional boundaries, without the usual assumptions about who has something to teach whom. The commercial photography tutor, the GCSE teacher with one camera and no budget, the university lecturer supervising experimental post-photography and the documentary photographer teaching ethics through practice are all doing related but distinct things. I hope there’s something here for all of them.

These, then, are some propositions about what a good photography education, at whatever level, might be for.

Photography begins with a world that’s full

Most arts begin with a kind of emptiness or potential. The painter encounters a blank canvas. The sculptor a waiting material. The playwright an empty stage and the theatre an absent audience. Each requires the artist to project something into that emptiness. Photography begins differently. The world is already there, full of things that have their own existence regardless of the photographer’s intentions, indifferent to their wishes, refusing to cooperate. Even the photographer who works entirely with existing images, archives, found photographs, appropriated material, begins with a fullness that precedes them. They negotiate with what already exists. This proposition doesn’t survive every objection. It’s offered as a starting point. But something about photography’s relationship to existing reality feels constitutive rather than incidental. The full world is not the backdrop to the photograph but its material. Teaching young people strategies and tactics for negotiating seriously with what exists is, in my view, a form of education worth having.

Photographs disappear

This is photography’s most seductive and most dangerous quality, and it’s what makes photography education specifically necessary rather than merely useful. The subject dominates the image. The frame disappears. The decisions, the contingencies, the technology, are all quietly erased by the persuasiveness of the result. We look through photographs rather than at them, as if they were transparent windows onto the world rather than highly constructed arguments about it. Most students arrive at a photography education already fluent in photography’s conventions without realising it. They think they know what a photograph is and does. This tacit understanding is mostly unhelpful. A good photography education, therefore, involves estrangement and the discovery of cracks in what students already think they know. This is different from acquiring new knowledge. It is closer to finding that the ground you've been standing on is less solid than you thought. Holding the image still long enough for its own constructedness to surface. Asking where the frame ends and what was left outside it.

This doesn’t mean teaching students that photographs lie, or that all images are equally valid or invalid, or that reality is inaccessible. It means developing the habit of asking better questions. How was this made? By whom? For whom? Under what conditions? With what consequences? These questions apply as readily to a fashion photograph as to a war photograph, to a GCSE portfolio as to a doctoral thesis, to an AI-generated image as to a frame of analogue film.

Some argue that critical pedagogy, by teaching students to distrust official images and authoritative accounts, has contributed to the epistemological chaos in which the Artemis conspiracy theories flourish. If you teach students to question the truth claims of photographs, don’t you produce students who question everything, including things that are true? The answer depends on what kind of scepticism is being taught. Genuine critical thinking asks questions, weighs evidence, remains open to being wrong and changes its mind when the argument requires. The fake news reflex does something categorically different. It forecloses inquiry before it begins. It’s a pre-emptive refusal of evidence dressed up as independent thought. Its political function is not to democratise doubt but to concentrate credulity in whoever holds most power. Trust nothing except the authority that tells you to trust nothing. Shouting fake news is not a critical position. It’s an authoritarian ideology that dismisses critique rather than engaging with it. A good photography education encourages students to look harder, to keep looking, to develop criteria, to understand what fabrication looks like because they have created their own images. The student who has learned to ask how this image was made is better equipped to evaluate contested imagery.

This cuts in more than one direction. Critical education can itself become a closed system if it decides in advance which questions are permissible and which conclusions are correct. A classroom that treats certain histories as settled, certain images as beyond interrogation and certain interpretations as mandatory is not doing critical education. It’s doing catechism with a different sign. Students notice when scepticism only runs in approved directions. The result is not deeper engagement but cynicism, which is itself a recruiting ground for the fake news reflex, approached from the other direction. Genuine critical education must be willing to follow the argument into territory that’s uncomfortable for everyone, including the teacher.

What photographs do in the world

Photography is a democratic medium, relatively cheap, technically accessible and capable of producing documents that circulate widely and quickly. It has been used consistently by people without institutional power to make visible what those with power would prefer remained invisible. It has also been used, at least as consistently, to classify, surveil, objectify and harm. Both things are true. A photography education that acknowledges only one of them is incomplete. This political dimension belongs to all photography education, not only to documentary or photojournalism programmes. The commercial photographer who understands how images construct desire and identity is doing something related to the documentary photographer who understands how images construct evidence and witness. The fashion student who can read the politics of representation in a magazine spread is doing something related to the GCSE student who understands why their photographs tell a particular story about a particular place. The apparatus changes. The questions don’t.

On teachers

Clearing a bookshelf recently, I found a thank you card from three former students. It read: “Thank you so much for all your help over the past two years. We appreciate how you always smell nice and let us chatter away during our intense study days.” Not a word about threshold concepts or critical theory or photographic history or the ethics of representation. The quality of presence in the room. What students remember, years later, is not what was taught but what was caught. And what is caught requires proximity. A teacher who is genuinely alive to the medium, genuinely present to the student, genuinely willing to let the conversation go where it needs to go, is doing something that no technology replicates and no curriculum document captures. This is also the argument for schools and universities that no platform or app can make redundant. Anyone can learn from YouTube. But educational buildings create conditions that are impossible to replicate virtually. The suspension of ordinary demands. Communities of people struggling with the same recalcitrant material. The sustained attention of a knowledgeable adult to a particular young person at a particular moment. An ethos absorbed rather than declared.

But something must be admitted. The argument for aliveness implies a standard of pedagogical seriousness that current structures make very difficult to achieve. There is no PGCE in photography. School photography is frequently taught by art teachers working at the edges of their expertise, under impossible pressures, with inadequate resources. This is a structural problem, not a personal one. University lecturers in photography are often teaching to support their underfunded practices. The institutional gap between school and university photography education is wide and the conversation across it is almost entirely absent. The frameworks that might connect these levels of education barely exist. The professional structures that might develop and sustain photography teachers are largely absent. The pipes are blocked. The conversation needs to happen. The GCSE teacher with one shared camera and no budget may have as much to contribute to that conversation as the university professor. Possibly more, because constraints force a clarity about essentials that abundance sometimes obscures.

On AI

The relationship between photography and AI image generation is more complicated than either enthusiasts or alarmists suggest. The boundary between a photograph and a generated image is less stable than it appears, already blurred by decades of digital manipulation, computational photography and the long history of photographic construction. Photography is not innocent. It has served power as readily as it has questioned it. AI extends and accelerates these tendencies rather than introducing them. Both technologies are bad for the environment, implicated in exploitative labour practices, capable of aiding authoritarian projects, and able to produce images that lie convincingly. The defence of photography education cannot rest on the virtue of the medium. It rests on the virtue of the thinking the medium demands when taught with seriousness and care.

One of my Year 12 students recently handed me a three-page letter explaining why she had chosen not to participate in a cautious classroom experiment with an AI photography guide. She wrote: “Just because something has been promoted as inevitable, does not make it any more ethical […] AI is not the future, it is destroying the future.” She didn’t need a philosophy of photography education to arrive at this. She needed a classroom in which serious thinking was expected and the time and safety to follow the argument wherever it led. That she directed some of it back at me is precisely the point. AI presents a specific danger. Its business model, like that of social media before it, depends on increasing engagement, reliance and ultimately dependency. Young people who grow up using AI as a default thinking aid, who have outsourced the struggle that produces genuine understanding, will lack the critical distance required to use the tool rather than be used by it. AI dependency is largely invisible. It looks like productivity. It may be its opposite. The moral panic will come. After some initial enthusiasm for everyday efficiencies, schools will probably reach for prohibition, as they did with phones. What photography education can offer, if it’s doing its work, is something more useful than either panic or accommodation. It has always been in the business of teaching students to look hard at seductive technologies and find the construction underneath. The question is whether it’s being taught widely enough and seriously enough to make a difference before the dependency forms.

Saying yes

There is a kind of experience that cannot be put into words. You know this if you have ever tried to describe a piece of music to someone who hasn’t heard it, or explain why a particular arrangement of light and shadow suddenly demanded to be photographed. The American photographer Henry Wessel described the experience with characteristic precision. “I try and work before my mind is telling me what to do,” he said. “You cannot be thinking. You’re just, ‘Yes,’ feeling, ‘Yes.’ Boom. You’re there.” That “Yes” is a bodily response to something encountered before language arrives to name it. Photography is, among other things, a discipline for cultivating this kind of attention. The kind that precedes naming. Philip Perkis, the great American photography teacher, understood what is lost when education rewards only what can be measured. “When a very small child sees the dog, points and says, ‘dog’, the parents go nuts with enthusiasm,” he wrote. “What about the light that describes the dog’s fur in the sun, in the shade? No rewards for any of this. The naming is what counts.”

A good photography education makes room for the knowledge that is genuine but evaporates when you try to express it in words. For the walk that produces nothing and then, at the last moment, something that can’t be easily explained. Photography is, in this sense, a great adventure in thinking and looking. Teaching it should feel like one.

But this kind of attention is not innocent. The freedom to look carefully, to take pleasure in a fragment of an unfinished world, depends on conditions that are not equally distributed. Safety. Time. The absence of immediate threat. The luxury of attention. These are political achievements, not natural states. Photography education cannot conjure those conditions from within a classroom. What it can do is use the protected time and space that schools and universities provide, slightly walled off from the world's full demands, to cultivate something worth taking back out into it. The habit of looking before judging. The willingness to sit with what resists easy interpretation. The sensitivity to what is present but overlooked. These are not only photographic capacities. They are ways of being in the world more carefully, more justly, with eyes open to what the speed and noise of ordinary life tends to obscure. Photography education, at its best, develops people who see more clearly. Not only better photographers, but more attentive witnesses.

Why this conversation needs to happen

Young people are already navigating vertiginous conditions. The self-consciousness of adolescence, the intensity of social judgment and the pressure toward certainty at precisely the moment when everything is most uncertain. Add an information environment saturated with fabricated images, contested realities, and technologies designed to exploit attention and the need for an education that develops genuine critical faculties becomes urgent rather than merely desirable. Photography education can’t offer stability. But it can offer company in the instability. A teacher who has looked hard at difficult things and kept looking. A community of people negotiating the same resistance. The sustenance of being taken seriously by someone who has more experience than you and can point at things that disrupt your everyday understanding, that may not be what you wanted but might be exactly what you need. The calibration of a moral compass through repeated encounters with difficult images and difficult questions, without the pretence that the questions have easy answers. Not an education in despair. Something closer to an education in remaining curious about a world that doesn’t resolve. Whether these arguments hold across the full range of contexts in which photography is taught, from the fashion studio to the community darkroom, from the GCSE classroom to the doctoral seminar, is for practitioners to judge. These are propositions, not prescriptions, an attempt to locate some common ground on which serious photography educators, across institutions and levels, might stand together and ask questions.

The Artemis II photographs of Earth are extraordinary. Made deliberately, intentionally, by people who understood exactly what they were doing and why, they show a world that is simultaneously completely familiar and utterly transformed by the distance from which it is seen. Blue and white against the absolute dark. Fragile. Particular. Irreplaceable. Full. Surrounded, on social media, by fakes that a million people found more convincing.

The photographs are worth arguing about. So is the education that might teach us to look at them seriously. That conversation needs to happen.

These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.

Buy me some film