30 Years Later....

In 1978, years before most students in my college classes were born, I developed black and white photos in a makeshift darkroom in the basement of my high school. Although flashbacks of the foul scent of fixer still occasionally plague my senses, I fondly remember the joy of watching my photographs slowly emerge on paper as it floated in liquid beneath a dim yellow light. It was then, despite the archaic technology of the times, I fell in love with portrait photography.

I took pictures of my friends, neighbors, and family. I recall trying to compose photographs that revealed the personalities of my subjects and their attributes: five year-old Penny Scarborough sailing toward the sky on her backyard swing with the ties of her dress following her, my ten year-old brother sitting at the wheel of my father’s parked Olds Cutlass Supreme straining to see above the dashboard. I remember saying, “Photographs only interest me if people are in them.”

And today, 30 years later, I use different tools to capture images of people I love. I make slideshows of my students, web-based albums of family vacations, and pictorial chronicles of my growing family set to music. All of my pictures feature people; each shot designed to reveal the character, passion, or interests of the subjects. Most of my shots get deleted (my favorite attribute of digital photography), but the surviving few are my art in my eyes.
In this course I want to further develop my understanding of the technical aspects of digital photography and become a better portrait photographer. I want to find ways to weave photography and visual literacy into my lessons at school so that each of my students can discover their own art through photography.