Go ahead, I am not an authority in the field of teaching photography. In fact, photography is not my profession. However, in the almost 3 years of life that the Photographer's Blog has had , I have felt very closely the frustration of many fans who started to study photography but ended up desperate and frustrated.
Today is a little criticism (constructive, I promise) addressed to all those teachers of Schools of Photography . The following letter synthesizes regrets and frustrations that come to me every day from my readers, photography fans who leave the classroom knowing less and less. I hope this cry reaches the right ears.
Dear Professor of School of Photography,
There is no doubt that you master photography. Seriously, no one doubts it. So you don't need to impress your students with complicated technicalities from day one. Exhibiting fancy terminology in most cases you achieve the opposite effect, that of scaring and intimidating your students . And your mission is not that but just the opposite. You don't need to deploy all that overwhelming technical arsenal from the first session. Please, let your first session ALWAYS go by without mentioning any technicalities . Oh really. Later on you will have the opportunity to delve into technicalities everything that is necessary, but not at first.
The first day of a photography enthusiast in one of these classes is a fateful and key moment.. Depending on the sensation that you cause your students, you will provoke in them love and passion for photography, or confusion, hatred and rejection. Everything is played in that first class.
Your mission is not to teach photography. Your mission is to make the photography fan fall in love, to cause that spark. You are a little Cupid of photography, a provocateur of "passion". This passion is the fuel that the student will use from that moment on to learn photography, overcome those technicalities and difficulties, and continue to have endurance. Aperture and Shooting Speed? What difference does it make!
Think about it for a moment: Wouldn't you like your students to associate you with a pleasant memory and consider you responsible for their passion and love for photography? The typical professor/teacher that you remember all your life. Don't your hair stand on end at the possibility that there are people who have abandoned photography, forever, out of fear, confusion, frustration, because of you?
Every time a student of yours stops going to class and leaves the course in the middle, you are witnessing a "photographic suicide" possibly caused by you. When you make one of your students believe that they are not valid, that they do not know much, that they are not intelligent enough to capture all the concepts, even if you do it unconsciously, you are condemning them to a photographic failure for life . No, the student not trying hard is not a valid excuse. Your student does not need to exert himself. It is your job that he learns effortlessly. You don't just have to master photography, that's only 50%. The other 50% is called pedagogy. That is, know how to transmit, know how to communicate, trick, bewitch, fall in love, dose, enchant.
It's called teaching.
