Bouncing balls, building blocks, filling blanks

By Jon Nicholls, Thomas Tallis School

Year 11 students cutting and reassembling vintage transparencies in Dafna Talmor's workshop.

This post is an attempt to document the impact of Tate's Summer School 2016 on my practice this year so far. I've written about the experience of attending the 5 days of workshops in a previous post. It's difficult to disentangle the various influences that shape your teaching - discussions with colleagues, visiting exhibitions, reading articles, students' responses and misconceptions, talks and workshops - but I feel there are several strands that can be unravelled that relate directly to Summer School and have helped shape my lessons over the last 8 weeks or so. 

The classroom as studio/laboratory
One of the challenges I've faced since September is teaching a Year 13 photography class in an art room (rather than our specialist photography room) with limited access to ICT. Inspired by Anna and Alex's inventive use of a range of materials, processes (and spaces) during the Summer School, this constraint has encouraged me to attempt a wider range of experiments, perhaps more closely linked to contemporary art practice than a traditional photography course. Thinking about the limitations of this space (no studio lights, darkroom or easy access to laptops/the Internet, printing etc.) has prompted a more inventive approach which has, in turn, influenced the activities I have offered to other groups back in the photography room.

​During the latter part of the summer holidays I printed about 300 of my own photographs (quite cheaply using Photobox) for the students to use in the early September experiments. The emphasis has been on looking, sorting, collaborating, discussing, selecting, sequencing, describing, displaying and documenting. These skills, I hoped, would all help them in the ongoing development and refinement of their Personal Investigations. I was also keen to explore another provocation from Summer School about the relationship between still and moving images. Here are some of the documentary images and videos from these early experiments, directly influenced by similar Summer School activities:

The students were asked to work in groups, selecting only 5 images and placing them in a sequence. These were then stuck to the classroom wall in a single line arranged edge to edge. Photographs were taken of the join between each pair of images and a camera on a wheel mounted tripod was used to film various tracking shots. One group decided to experiment with adding additional circular apertures cut from postcards. One of the tracking shots featured additional images added to the original selection, inspired by one of Anna's films. We also explored the relationship between photographs and verbal descriptions of their formal elements, creating a slideshow of captions minus the original photographs.

Summer School had raised the following questions for me:

• How can I encourage more purposeful collaboration?
• How can we all begin making much sooner and immerse ourselves in a dialogue with materials, not just photographic?
• How might we use the products of these preliminary making sessions in the next phase of our activities?

These experiments with the selection, sequencing and display of found photographs certainly put the emphasis on experimentation with materials. Together with a further set of prompts (again inspired by Anna and Alex's instructions), space was created in the classroom/studio for playful investigation designed to deliberately undermine the authority of the single photographic image. 

Our guiding Threshold Concepts were #5 and #6 (with the support of #4 and #7). Beneath the messing about was a more serious proposal - photographs are technological and cultural constructs, requiring critical intelligence on the part of the maker and viewer. ​

The colour photocopier proved to be a really helpful tool for undermining the single image (although several colleagues waiting behind us in the queue might not have been so sympathetic):

Experiments with found images were not restricted to my photographs or the attractions of the colour photocopier! I decided to buy some vintage, medium format negatives from eBay so that Year 12 students could explore TC#1 and TC#6 in the darkroom.

We set about cutting the negatives and recombining them (by chance and more deliberately) so that we could then learn how to enlarge, print and develop the resulting photographs. An additional element of chance was supplied by the use of old, our of date, fibre based paper acquired from Freecycle.

The enlarging process was further disrupted by the use of paper circles, creating apertures in the resulting images. 

Medium format negatives purchased on eBay

The use of old paper enabled us to discuss aspects of TC#10. Unexpected patterns, caused by years of light leaking onto the surface of the paper, reminded us of the materiality of the photographic image perhaps best exemplified in the practice of artists like Alison Rossiter.

Year 11 photographers have also been experimenting with a range of strategies inspired by Summer School, producing some exciting outcomes. The circle cutters have certainly been popular and students have enjoyed playing with openings/obstructions, inside/outside, text/image, digital/analogue etc:

Performing for (and with) the Camera
A central feature of our Summer School experience was the notion of performance. We took various objects out into the galleries, at one point making a spectacle of ourselves. I really enjoyed the process of creating cardboard apertures and the collaborative performance in the Tanks. I wondered in my previous Summer School post "whether we could make interesting use of break and lunchtimes to share work with the wider school community and use the element of surprise." Consequently, we have attempted our own (ongoing) series of performances in school, beginning with a reprise of 'Apertures' featuring Year 13 photographers:

I felt particularly sorry for the group who ended up performing in the pouring rain! I've encouraged the Year 13 students to explore the relationship between photography and performance, referring to specific examples and the catalogues of Tate's fantastic 'Performing for the Camera' and 'Conceptual Art in Britain 1964-1979' exhibitions. We've discussed the various roles a photographer can perform (pun intended):

• documenting someone else's performance (e.g. Shunk and Kender's practice)
• performing for the camera (e.g. the self-portrait)
• performing with the camera (e.g. John Baldessari)

We've attempted a couple of collaborative performances to test these notions. For example, we made a pinhole (binhole?) camera from a large, black waste bin in order to create class portraits:

We have made out of date photographic paper aeroplanes, flown them in public and developed the resulting 'aerographs':

We have explored the One Minute Sculptures of Erwin Wurm:

We've had some fun (a worthy end in itself) but I think the students have found these experiments a bit bewildering. It will be interesting to see what emerges later on this year. Hopefully, they will have become slightly more conscious of the performative role all photographers play when they are operating a camera (especially in public) and the nature of the relationship between photographer and human subject. A few of early video sketches, exploring time and motion, are encouraging:

We have some other performances planned across the visual, media and performing arts. Year 9 students helped to curate an event for The Big Draw, an activity from which was repeated with staff in Wednesday morning briefing. Other events include the operation of a drawing machine, created by our art technician, and numerous impromptu music, dance and drama performances that will pop up unannounced throughout the year in a series of unlikely places. Our aim is to generate a sense of surprise and delight.
​
​Working alongside an artist
This aspect of the Summer School is obviously the most fundamental and the hardest to replicate back at school.

Yes, as teachers, we try to model the creative process by making work ourselves, but there is nothing quite like having artists visit the school to share their practice and work alongside the students. Budgets are tighter than ever and time is precious. However, we must find ways to make artist visits a reasonably regular part of the curriculum, otherwise we are limiting the scope of art in education. I have long admired the work of Dafna Talmor and, given the nature of her practice, she seemed the ideal artist to invite into school to work with Year 11 and 13.

Her visit was wonderfully inspiring, combing a short talk about her practice, some links to other artists working in unusual ways with found imagery and a practical workshop involving the cutting, reassembling and projecting of vintage transparencies. Here are some of the Year 11 responses:

I've not seen this particular class become quite so absorbed in the process of making photographic images as they did in Dafna's workshop. The excitement of moving from working with a scalpel on a tiny scale over a light box to seeing the images projected on the end wall of the classroom reminded me of the screening of our 16mm film during the Summer School - a strange mixture of surprise, wonder, pride and appreciation. Had I not experienced the tremendous benefit of working alongside artists myself at Summer School, I'm not sure I would have been as determined to get an artist into school to work with my students. Now that it's happened, I'm even more committed to making this a more regular occurrence!

I have by no means exhausted the ideas and opportunities generated during Tate Summer School. I'm still keen to make a rotating table and a makeshift track for video experiments. I'd love to work with Super 8 or 16mm film. I'm pleased to have begun the process of transferring ideas into my school context and excited about the way my own practice has expanded. I'm looking forward to seeing how these experiments impact on the students' work over the coming months.

Now, time to give some more thought to the PhotoPedagogy Tate Exchange Associate project...