I teach both photography and psychotherapy and as such am what is known as a ‘dual professional’. We are a growing breed. Much of the teaching in universities and colleges is delivered today by people on ‘fractional’ contracts, but this is not what ‘dual professionalism’ is all about. Because my subjects are both (albeit in different ways) practical, I am expected to be ‘in practice’ for each. Similarly, although I am ‘part-time’, I am (not unreasonably) expected to be a professional with regards to my teaching; acquiring pedagogic skills, embracing new technologies, and adapting to changes in the attitudes of this environment. Gone are the days of ivory-towered, ‘Masters’, closeted from the real world, patronising from behind a lectern.
One of the key tools in the repertoire of photography tutors, acquired from the art world, is the ‘crit’. In the ‘crit’, (the last and most challenging of which is usually held in May in the final year of the students), students present a portfolio containing their best work to their tutor and their peers, who take turns to comment on it. Imagine this happening with a group of say a dozen students over a day. Allowing for refreshment breaks, that’s a little less than 30 minutes each. For five and a half hours, the student has to sit and look at others’ work, demonstrating their knowledge and perception by making erudite observations or asking penetrating questions. Then, for 30 minutes, they experience being on the receiving end. The place in which this occurs is often referred to as the ‘crucible’. To suggest that the critics learn from the work of their peers is a joke. Until their own slot, they are sweating. After their own, they are desperately trying to prove their grasp of the subject by screwing their peers. At best, that is 30 minutes of ‘learning’ through ‘feedback’ and five and a half hours wasted.
The language of art (and this includes photography) is subjective. What one person likes, and therefore looks for, in a piece of work, will be to the distaste of another person. As Bourdieu observed, the language of the discipline is ‘arbitrary’. Nevertheless, while all art is judged from a personal frame of reference, teachers try to impart consistency in the words with which it shall be judged. The crit is one place (if not the main place) where this transfer of the culture of a particular viewpoint occurs.
Whether it is delivered by tutors or peers, there is a power dynamic created. The students must demonstrate their command of the language – in part through their own work, but mainly through the language with which they judge their peers’ work. ‘Skilled’ tutors hold back from commenting until the student’s peers have done their work. Then, the tutor can either seal the fate of the victim or demonstrate their humanity.
In formal education circles, the cruelty of the ‘crit’ is acknowledged, defended, and attempts are made to diminish its harm. At one institution in Europe, one professor stated that in 20 years, six students on his course had taken their own lives because they lacked obstinacy and resistance – qualities tested in the ‘crit’. He said that this is “quite sad but consequent.”
Attempts to diminish the harm of the crit range from taught sessions on how to be resilient in them, a process of progressive ‘toughening up’ over the three years of the course, reducing the number of peers involved at any one time, coaching in how to deliver a ‘shit sandwich’, and the post-crit drink.
I’ve experienced the photographic ‘crit’ myself three times in recent years. It can’t be much fun having another teacher on your course – they are bound (well, I am anyway) to be hoping to learn from your pedagogic skills as much as from you artistically. The first experience was with a mid-career academic who hadn’t even learnt to keep his mouth shut until the peers had finished their demolition job. The second was with an eminent practitioner in his late 70s. We were subjected to five hours of his own opinions on our work, in a session that had been timetabled for two hours – none of us got to speak except for the poor student trying to defend their own work. Finally, the third was by a junior academic/practitioner (a ‘dual professional’) who acknowledged immediately that she did not approve of the ‘crit’, invited us each to discuss our own work, told the group that they could ask questions that would help their own work, but never to express opinions. She modelled this questioning herself throughout. Guess which one, my peers and I learnt the most from!
In the training of counsellors and psychotherapists, we too have our equivalents of the crit. Our students engage in triad work, where they put their skills into practice for a block of time (typically 20 minutes) with a peer observer present. This is followed by a discussion of what happened for a further 20 minutes before the roles are rotated. It doesn’t seem to matter how often we make the point that this is a discussion and that each person has a valid perspective, I still hear observers passing judgment; “I really liked the way you…”, which is invariably followed by “I wonder if you could have…”. Most students will say that they find this a wonderful experience, but they tend to do so when the feedback has been sweetened to such an extent that they bask in the deluded view that the gaffs they know they made have escaped the notice of their enamoured peers. We have a second form of torture, common to almost all trainings, known as the ‘process group’. All that needs to be said is that these used to be known as ‘Encounter Groups’ and it was as a result of their early brutality that Carl Rogers (founder of the Person Centred Approach) wrote an article and a book about how to conduct them more developmentally. Sadly, few tutors seem to be aware of Rogers’ contributions and conduct them in as confrontational manner as they experienced them.
This is a form of abuse, and there are parallels with victims in other contexts. There are a proportion who believe that this kind of power imbalance is ‘normal’ and they accept it. Tragically, some go one step further and then inflict it on others themselves.
One concept that we have in counselling is that of ‘personal agency’. This is the belief that people don’t benefit from the advice of others. They may ‘hear’ it, but they won’t ‘act’ on it. For a client to make change happen in their life, they need to have thought of it themselves first. While there’s much that could be done to improve counsellor training, the over-arching concept of the profession that we don’t give advice, but help our clients distil their own wisdom pervades all that we do.
This argument applies to ‘critiquing’ in photography classes too.
Fairly recently, I was the voluntary Organiser of one of the regions of the Royal Photographic Society. As part of my role, I spoke to people who had been members of small local ‘camera clubs’. Now some clubs are wonderful, inviting, social entities, with engaging activities and good wine. However, the consistent message that I got from the people I spoke to, was that their experience was very different. They encountered cliques, places where certain genres were looked down upon as not being ‘art’, individuals (and worse, competition judges) whose critiques were subjective, inarticulate, inconsistent, patronizing (if not misogynistic), pedantic, and… (Well, you get the point.)
Nowadays, many thousands of people join online photographic forums. There must be hundreds on Facebook alone. People post their pictures (often taking months to build up the courage to do so) and invite ‘CC’ for ‘constructive criticism’. Of course, very few (if any) of the others in the group have any better opinions than their own. We might be blind to a few failings, but generally, we are our own worst critics. We know what disappoints us in our photograph, we are just hoping that someone else will tell us that it has merits that compensate.
Sadly, the peers rarely have training in how to critique effectively. Like the counsellors-in-training, they either offer gratuitous praise that nobody falls for, or damn us in the hope that this helps grow their status like their ego.
So, what is the purpose of looking at, and commenting on, an image whether it is during a ‘crit’, as part of an exhibition or camera club evening, or posted in an online forum?
It is to learn from it. We are not offering praise or punishment. We are not seeking to give advice to the originator of the photograph. We are considering ways in which our own photography could improve having looked carefully at this particular one.
It wouldn’t be right to complete this piece without giving some examples. Here are my online responses to two images – the work of one photographer.
“Thanks for posting this. I love my wide-angle lens and the opportunities that it presents for street photography, which is something people who rely on longer lenses miss out on. The wide-angle makes it so much easier to use compositional features, like leading lines, as you have here. And this, in turn, encourages me to use off-centre subjects, again, as you have.
The problem that I encounter is how to isolate the subject from the other elements. I normally work in black-and-white, only looking at the colour version retrospectively. What I take from your picture is the thought that colour might help with this isolation process, and perhaps I need to reconsider my approach. So, thank you – I shall look out for opportunities to do so.”
And the second:
“I don’t suppose that you managed a second shot once the red coat had passed? I’m curious what the image would be like with the yellow coat and yellow car aligned in the mid-distance as the leading lines converge.
Taking more shots is becoming my mantra to myself. It’s rather amazing that I manage to get any pictures where the details are exactly aligned, so I’m seriously thinking of setting up a burst mode when I’m just ‘flaneuring’!”
