Residency – Minneapolis Community and Technical College – John Johnston – 2hrs
This week the students had their first day to actually print their very own photo. It’s been a long process of lecture and example in the dark room to get here, but they officially know all the basics of the darkroom, enlargers, and chemicals. All of the students had a pretty easy time printing. The photos ranged from pictures of their pets or their apartments, to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. It’s pretty easy to identify which students have an interest in the images they were making and which ones maybe didn’t.
Next week I will be sitting down with John to go over ideas for my teaching day. I have two ideas that I like fairly well, the first is an old project I’ve been assigned before called performing place and the other is called a moment extended. The performing place project is finding some sort of place or setting and altering it to make it perform for you. This could be a simple alteration like connecting string across the room, or it could be a more permanent alteration. The idea is to take a setting for a photograph and have some say as the artist in directing our attention or evoking an emotion or connection to that place. The moment extended project was an idea that I got from a quote about photography. It said something along the lines of photography being able to see the world in a way our eyes are not capable, it’s able to take a moment and extend it. So with the moment extended project, I would like to utilize the slow shutter speed of our camera and photograph an extended moment. It could be people walking downtown and capturing all the lights that travel past and the blur of the pedestrians, or it could be a portrait that blurs our subject because of our inability to sit perfectly still. This project could be really great in getting students to explore the possibilities of how the shutter speed can affect their final image.