I teach both photography and psychotherapy and as such am what is known as a \u2018dual professional\u2019. We are a growing breed. Much of the teaching in universities and colleges is delivered today by people on \u2018fractional\u2019 contracts, but this is not what \u2018dual professionalism\u2019 is all about. Because my subjects are both (albeit in different ways) practical, I am expected to be \u2018in practice\u2019 for each. Similarly, although I am \u2018part-time\u2019, 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, \u2018Masters\u2019, closeted from the real world, patronising from behind a lectern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the key tools in the repertoire of photography tutors, acquired from the art world, is the \u2018crit\u2019.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Imagine this happening with a group of say a dozen students over a day.\u00a0 Allowing for refreshment breaks, that\u2019s a little less than 30 minutes each.\u00a0 For five and a half hours, the student has to sit and look at others\u2019 work, demonstrating their knowledge and perception by making erudite observations or asking penetrating questions.\u00a0 Then, for 30 minutes, they experience being on the receiving end.\u00a0 The place in which this occurs is often referred to as the \u2018crucible\u2019.\u00a0 To suggest that the critics learn from the work of their peers is a joke.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 At best, that is 30 minutes of \u2018learning\u2019 through \u2018feedback\u2019 and five and a half hours wasted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The language of art (and this includes photography) is subjective.\u00a0 What one person likes, and therefore looks for, in a piece of work, will be to the distaste of another person.\u00a0 As Bourdieu observed, the language of the discipline is \u2018arbitrary\u2019.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The crit is one place (if not the main place) where this transfer of the culture of a particular viewpoint occurs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whether it is delivered by tutors or peers, there is a power dynamic created. The students must demonstrate their command of the language \u2013 in part through their own work, but mainly through the language with which they judge their peers\u2019 work.\u00a0 \u2018Skilled\u2019 tutors hold back from commenting until the student’s peers have done their work.\u00a0 Then, the tutor can either seal the fate of the victim or demonstrate their humanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In formal education circles, the cruelty of the \u2018crit\u2019 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 \u2013 qualities tested in the \u2018crit\u2019. He said that this is \u201cquite sad but consequent.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Attempts to diminish the harm of the crit range from taught sessions on how to be resilient in them, a process of progressive \u2018toughening up\u2019 over the three years of the course, reducing the number of peers involved at any one time, coaching in how to deliver a \u2018shit sandwich\u2019, and the post-crit drink.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ve experienced the photographic \u2018crit\u2019 myself three times in recent years.\u00a0 It can\u2019t be much fun having another teacher on your course \u2013 they are bound (well, I am anyway) to be hoping to learn from your pedagogic skills as much as from you artistically.\u00a0 The first experience was with a mid-career academic who hadn\u2019t even learnt to keep his mouth shut until the peers had finished their demolition job.\u00a0 The second was with an eminent practitioner in his late 70s.\u00a0 We were subjected to five hours of his own opinions on our work, in a session that had been timetabled for two hours \u2013 none of us got to speak except for the poor student trying to defend their own work.\u00a0 Finally, the third was by a junior academic\/practitioner (a \u2018dual professional\u2019) who acknowledged immediately that she did not approve of the \u2018crit\u2019, 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.\u00a0 \u00a0She modelled this questioning herself throughout.\u00a0 Guess which one, my peers and I learnt the most from!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the training of counsellors and psychotherapists, we too have our equivalents of the crit.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This is followed by a discussion of what happened for a further 20 minutes before the roles are rotated.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t 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; \u201cI really liked the way you\u2026\u201d, which is invariably followed by \u201cI wonder if you could have\u2026\u201d. \u00a0\u00a0Most 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.\u00a0 We have a second form of torture, common to almost all trainings, known as the \u2018process group\u2019.\u00a0 All that needs to be said is that these used to be known as \u2018Encounter Groups\u2019 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.\u00a0 Sadly, few tutors seem to be aware of Rogers\u2019 contributions and conduct them in as confrontational manner as they experienced them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a form of abuse, and there are parallels with victims in other contexts.\u00a0 There are a proportion who believe that this kind of power imbalance is \u2018normal\u2019 and they accept it.\u00a0 Tragically, some go one step further and then inflict it on others themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One concept that we have in counselling is that of \u2018personal agency\u2019. This is the belief that people don\u2019t benefit from the advice of others. They may \u2018hear\u2019 it, but they won\u2019t \u2018act\u2019 on it. For a client to make change happen in their life, they need to have thought of it themselves first. While there\u2019s much that could be done to improve counsellor training, the over-arching concept of the profession that we don\u2019t give advice, but help our clients distil their own wisdom pervades all that we do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This argument applies to \u2018critiquing\u2019 in photography classes too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u2018camera clubs\u2019. 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 \u2018art\u2019, individuals (and worse, competition judges) whose critiques were subjective, inarticulate, inconsistent, patronizing (if not misogynistic), pedantic, and\u2026 (Well, you get the point.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u2018CC\u2019 for \u2018constructive criticism\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, what is the purpose of looking at, and commenting on, an image whether it is during a \u2018crit\u2019, as part of an exhibition or camera club evening, or posted in an online forum?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It wouldn\u2019t be right to complete this piece without giving some examples. Here are my online responses to two images – the work of one photographer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThanks 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.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n And the second:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “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.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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’!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I teach both photography and psychotherapy and as such am what is known as a \u2018dual professional\u2019. We are a growing breed. Much of the teaching in universities and colleges is delivered today by people on \u2018fractional\u2019 contracts, but this is not what \u2018dual professionalism\u2019 is all about. Because my subjects are both (albeit in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2418,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,35,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-my-photo-journey","category-my-teaching-journey","category-sophistication"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tobelikethis.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tobelikethis.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tobelikethis.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tobelikethis.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tobelikethis.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2416"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/tobelikethis.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2431,"href":"https:\/\/tobelikethis.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2416\/revisions\/2431"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tobelikethis.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tobelikethis.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tobelikethis.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tobelikethis.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}