
Photography Education Symposium
Friday 13th March 2009 1200-17:00) London South Bank University, Keyworth St Building, Keyworth St, London SE1 0AA
Participants include: Anne Williams (course director, MA/Postgraduate Diploma Photography at London College of Communication), Anna Fox (Head of the BA and MA Photography Course at the University for the Creative Arts at Farnham), Geraint Cunnick (Head of Art and Photography, European Centre for Photographic Research at Newport School of Art, Media and Design) and paula roush (lecturer and researcher, Digital Photography at London South Bank University).
Journal Photographies
Issue four of the journal Photographies (editorial group led by Martin Lister and Andrew Dewdney) will focus upon the topic of photography and education. The issue, to be published in September 2009, aims to consider the current state of the teaching of photography as a subject in the context of recent changes in education, culture and technology: changes in the economies of knowledge, the modes of photographic production, circulation and use and the technologies of image engineering.
Symposium
Alongside this issue the one day symposium at London South Bank University on Friday 13th March 2009 addresses three themes which provide a guide to the interests this issue is seeking responses to.
1. Recent Changes in the Economies of Knowledge
The question here might be ‘what is it to have a knowledge of photography now?’ and what then, given this question, constitutes teaching and learning about photography? We are interested in answers to and speculation around this question which reference and recognize changes in the nature of knowledge and its organization. We are equally interested in approaches which tackle the philosophy, history, and politics of education and photography.
2. Changes in the Production, Circulation and Use of Photographic Images
There has been much interest and speculation in academic, research and teaching contexts about the significance of Web 2.0 and its corresponding forms of social networking, the social and cultural uses of mobile image/text devices, ONLINE image banks archives. It has been suggested that new networked media have reshaped as well as extended the production, circulation and use of photography. We are interested in examples of educational engagement in this area as well as cultural and ethnographic understandings of the lived experience and the contexts of such photographic exchanges.
3. New Developments in Image Engineering Technologies
For some, photography has a history and tradition which is not dependent upon, nor can be reduced to, its mechanical and digital technics. For others, teaching photography on the basis of digital technologies is accompanied by a desire to move beyond photographic tradition, to cross subject boundaries and to chart a new course. Digitally based technologies have been practically taken up across the spectrum of teaching photography, but how are they understood? Whilst the post-photography moment has come and gone as a mainly theoretical challenge, how in practice, pedagogy and curricula is the widespread use of digital technology understood to be different from the analogue, if at all?