Student Work Portfolio is an impressionistic collage of my favorite work from my photography students when I taught at the University of Iowa. I had the pleasure of teaching this class to non-art major students and loved helping them transform into amazing photographers.
On Photography and Teaching Photography
I am an over thinker. Photography is the antidote. In balance, the act of photography is to enter a state of heightened awareness; one of direct observation. In art, there has to be something in it for the artist. For me, it’s the pleasure of being present, with my eyes far ahead of my thoughts.
When one begins the practice of photography, it’s best to just walk outside and respond to your surroundings. Let the process lead to inspiration. To be aware and present is different than thinking hard about what you want to photograph. Thinking gets in the way of seeing. Photography is a generous medium. There are good conditions for photographs everywhere, every day, in every moment. Take lots of photos.
As an environmental photographer, there’s really only three things to photograph in the world: people, people things, and nature. Within this limited three note musical scale, endless variations manifest. A photograph’s power is in its potential to evoke an emotional response and suggest larger cultural and psychological themes not present in the subject matter at hand.
Photographing people can be tricky. One either needs to be stealthy from a distance or to develop skills to engage directly in collaboration with the subject. For now, focus on developing an interplay between the three elements. Play around with how to fit what you are photographing within the four corners of your frame. Two important considerations are where to stand (vantage point) and when to press the shutter. Let the people, if there are any, be part of a larger landscape.
When the improvisation with the landscape concludes, I invite back my thoughts and intellect to make sense of the body of work. I find most often that there was usually some subconscious decisions that compelled me to make the work at hand, which at the time simply felt right.
There’s a lot to learn from why you photograph when you see all of the photos together in the editing process. Find connections, find surprises. Don’t take for granted that you have transformed space and time into a flat static image. Note how the thing is different than the thing photographed.
Through my investigations in the real world, I have come to see the landscape not as a place, but as a parcel of time, defined through layers of cultural accumulations commingling in the present tense. The American landscape has been mostly altered over the last two hundred years, yet these layers are built upon lands inhabited for the last twenty thousand (and new studies suggest much longer). All of this is built on top of geology shaped over the last few billion years. I use these layers to communicate larger ideas of the American story.
What I found wasn’t something I was looking for. Once I found it, I continued to investigate, but didn’t let it become what “my work is about.” Keep photography open and exploratory, and avoid placing your practice into a narrow bandwidth.
I use the word art reluctantly. It’s loaded. If I can say anything about the role art plays in my daily life, it’s one of awareness and investigation. It’s about being in a state of play, of openness, and curiosity towards personal discoveries. On rare occasion, these discoveries are worth sharing with others.
When sharing your work, you may discover that the photograph you were most excited about falls flat, while photographs you didn’t think much about really resonate with others. Making is the fun part. Sharing can be both a pleasant and sometimes maddening experience. You can learn lots from both ends of the scale.
Some of the photographs I make work well on their own, but I am most interested in sharing complete, cohesive bodies of work presented in book form. I enjoy the accessibility of books, as well as the challenge of sequencing images made over a period of time into a linear narrative.
Whether or not the body of work you have made has a linear narrative, a book does. It has a first page, a last page, and a linear progression of pages in between. Making photo books is an art in and of itself. Try making a body of work with a linear sequence in mind and see what happens, or use photographs as individual words in a slowly evolving visual sentence.
All art is based on the same foundational elements. Learning about music, painting, graphic design, cinema, poetry, and other forms will help develop your skills as a photographer.
Barry Phipps
Aperture
Shutter
Iso
Focus (fixed and selected)
Focal length
Vantage point
When to press the shutter
Crop / Aspect Ratio / Intervals
Focal length to shutter speed rule
Sunny 16 rule
Exposure
Creating a Lightroom Catalog
File Management
Monitor brightness setting
Selecting and Editing
The Develop Module:
Histogram
Crop
White balance
Exposure
Contrast
Highlights / Mid tones / Shadows
HSL tool
Lens distortion correction
Noise reduction
Composition
Rule of thirds
Recognizing Compositional Elements in the environment:
Line, shape, form, texture, negative space, repetition, variety, juxtaposition, horizontal, vertical, diagonal, etc.
Layers of time in the landscape
Illusion of space, flat plane
Creating unity from elements
Mental modeling / How we see and don’t see
Photographing the available environment
Engaging in portraiture
Stealing candids
Environmental portraits
Creating a cohesive body of work
Sequencing a body of work
Printing
Historical and contemporary examples of the above done well
Teaching Philosophy
In 2008 I flew to California to take a portrait workshop with legendary wedding photographer Jose Villa. The moment I stepped into his studio, Jose greeted me by name and asked how my trip from Chicago went. As I was the first to arrive, I watched as he did the same for the other twelve or so students attending the workshop. He had taken the time to find an image online of each of us; memorizing names and basic professional information. Not only did he continue to call us by name throughout the day, but he built on the basic info to establish a working relationship. We all left feeling like we had made a new friend.
When I had the fortune to teach photography for three years at the University of Iowa, I began the first class by taking a quick portrait of each of my students as they introduced themselves to the class. I printed a contact sheet with each person’s name, area of study (all were non-art majors), and what they wanted most from the class. By the second class I knew everyone’s names. It was also important to me that everyone knew everyone else, so I began each class with a quick check in. I would call on every student by name in the same order each time and ask them to share any victories or challenges they were having with the assignments. By calling on everyone, no one was left behind. In high school I was a shy student, but if called on I always had something constructive to say.
Whenever possible, I taught photography as a collective group. We all shot together and learned from each other during class time. Class critiques were also collective. I called on each person in the class to respond to each other’s work, both in writing and verbal forms. We placed a high value on group consensus to determine through voting on the strongest images from each person’s submitted work. We would print only the strongest work from each student, and present everyone’s top printed images together in a group showing.
I also valued working one-on-one with each student as they edited and adjusted their images in Lightroom. In each class I would try to make two rounds through to give individual attention based on their own personal style.
The most valued lesson I learned from teaching Elements of Digital Photography to non-art major students is that everyone is creative and that anyone who cares about the craft can become exceptional artists if they put in the work. The examples included in this portfolio of student work are from people majoring in anything from Engineering, Chemistry, English, Psychology, Business, Sports Management, and more.
When Jose Villa showed us how he photographed portraits, I saw his approach as a reciprocity of energies. The positivity of his direction and collaboration with those he photographed was returned with the highest spirit of the subject.
Recently I read Stephen Shore’s Modern Instances, where he spoke of the legendary photography curator John Szarkowski (who generously helped Shore when he was very young): “I don’t think he treated me with respect because I was special, but because he was special. When he encountered a person, regardless of age, he saw a human being worth being payed attention to.”
Barry Phipps