#photopingpong with the NSEAD

On Saturday 27 June Chris and I had the great pleasure of attending the National Society for Education in Art and Design conference in Birmingham. The folks at the NSEAD have been very generous in their support of the PhotoPedagogy project and we were given a 30 minute slot to share our vision and plans, the website, the first edition of the newspaper (Wrong?) and play a game of #photopingpong with assembled delegates. In truth, we'd been so busy playing our own game of #photopingpong (see below) that we had slightly neglected to prepare a traditional Powerpoint style presentation, so we improvised.

We took our theme from Walker Evans' famous description of the affordances of one kind of approach to photography that was emerging in the 1930s:

swift chance, disarray, wonder & experiment

As well as being a fairly good description of our presentation style, we liked this quotation because it echoed some of the themes of the newspaper, dealing as it does with notions of chance and wrongness. We also quoted Jerry L. Thompson whose 'Why Photography Matters' kept me company on the train:

When photography is at its best there exists a balance between the outside - our visible world - and the inside - the perceiving, shaping intelligence of the photographer. When photography is at its best, these two elements cooperate as a dialectic.

We wondered aloud why so many photography courses seemed to be springing up all over the country. Who were these photography courses for? Why now? What specific skills and understanding did studying photography offer young people? 

Rather than answering these questions directly we talked about our game of #photopedagogy:

We then had an opportunity to discuss some of these ideas with delegates, encouraging them to play their own game of #photopedagogy on the NSEAD Facebook page. 

The conference was really enjoyable. It's only the third time Chris and I have met in person. As Susan Coles, the ex president of the NSEAD, writes in the paper:

The internet has proven an amazing place for networking - bottom up, not top down. Communities of art practitioners and educators - flourishing on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, blogs and so on - are now identifying new areas to address.

Judging by the epic scope of the #photopingpong game still in progress on FB (138 returns of serve at the time of writing), the PhotoPedagogy concept seems to have struck a chord.

-- Jon Nicholls