Pedagogy and Pluralism.

43RD SOCIETY FOR PHOTOGRAPHIC

EDUCATION NATIONAL CONFERENCE

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

MARCH 23-26, 2006

While many recent national conferences of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE) have addressed the influence of new technologies and the changing nature of academia, whether directly or by default, this year's gathering flew overtly under the banner of "A New Pluralism: Photography's Future." Covering this topic in any comprehensive manner in one weekend is a tall order but after forty-three years the organization is ripening into middle age, accepting inevitable change, and progressively looking forward to future eras. This theme invited preliminary conversations around such issues as how photographic practice is redefined as a result of digital technologies and the potential of photographic education within the increasing milieu of multidisciplinary academic practices.

Henry Jenkins, professor of Humanities and director of the Comparative Media Studies program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, opened the proceedings with an engaging Keynote Address. The indomitable Jenkins, author or co-author of such books as Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992), Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (2003), and From Barbie [R] to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (2000), presented "I Want to Teach the World to See: Amateur Photography, Participatory Culture, and Media Convergence," built upon ideas raised in his forthcoming book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. He first defined technological "convergence" as interplay between old and new media, a cultural process whereby a community pools knowledge, referencing Pierre Levy's notion of collective intelligence. Jenkins discussed how relationships between existing technologies, markets, industries, and audiences are changed by this process. "Convergence," he explained, "alters the logic by which media industries operate and by which media consumers process news and entertainment." He clarified convergence as a "process, not an endpoint": contrary to the predictions (and fears) of some, all media will not converge into a single-source conveyance. Instead, we can look forward to a future "where media will be everywhere." Jenkins, always equipped with a wealth of pop culture referents, provided numerous examples of convergence from the Sims to cell phones to amateur video to Flickr.

Honored Educator Carl Toth, artist-in-residence and head of the Photography Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, utilized familial images and a personal history of imagemaking to examine the interpretation of photographs. Featured Speaker Barbara Stafford, a professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago presented "Beyond the Atomistic Aperture: The Spiritual History of the Apparatus." Stafford drew upon the objects she gathered for "Devices of Wonder," an exhibition at the Getty Museum in 2001 that explored the historical underpinnings of the concepts of "multimedia" and "virtual reality" by documenting human interest in sense-enhancing and imagemaking technologies since the Renaissance. Stafford, a noted scholar, offered an accessible exploration of the polyopticalities resulting from early modern visual technologies; her enthusiasm for her subject was infectious.

Established artists, academics, and critics, as well as talented younger artists, offered lectures and panel discussions on topics directly related to the conference theme such as April Katz's "Photography and the New Genetic Pluralism" and Jane Tormey's "Photography Traversing Domains: the literal, the non-literal and the literary" as well as farther afield but no less relevant discussions including Liz Wells's "Landscape, Geography and Topographic Photography" and "Considering the Photobook" with Lucy Lippard, Martin Parr, Jane Rabb, and Alex Sweetman. More practical and technical issues were addressed in such sessions as "Scanner as Camera" and "Putting the Digital in Photographic Education." At the panel "The Allure of Being Desired: Photographers Re-Vision Fashion" Photographer Melanie Pullen was unable to justify to the overflow audience what was perceived as the objectification of women in her sensational photographic reconstructions of their violent deaths in her series "High Fashion Crime Scenes" (2002-2003). Participants in "El Llano Estacado: A Cultural and Geographical Island in the Sky" shared their transformative collaborative experience documenting the historic titular area of Texas and New Mexico. Perhaps a reflection of the conference's forward focus, only a small handful of sessions looked back at historical practices. Andrew Hershberger's "Daguerre's Diorama: A Bit of Photography's Pluralistic Future in its Pre-History?," while a fascinating and detailed study, was ultimately frustrating in that no visual documentation of Daguerre's dioramas was available.

One of the most exciting bodies of work by the dozen presenting "Image-makers" was "Blood Work" (2003-2004) by Jawshing Arthur Liou, the 2006 Garry B Fritz Imagemaker Award winner. In one of the few conference sessions highlighting the moving image, Liou shared his series of high-definition videos created in response to his young daughter's leukemia, work that is both emotionally affecting and aesthetically stunning in its complex conceptual and scientific nature and technical finery. Alexander Mouton and Christian Faur demonstrated their book project allowing readers to interact with a bar code on each book, using a scanner kiosk to subvert the traditional linear reading of text-based documents.

The SPE conference provides above all an opportunity for networking and the sharing of new and unique practices. The questions that continue to arise around the movement toward more multidisciplinary pedagogy and in regard to the increasing implementation of new technologies, while met with some restraint here, has no doubt just begun.

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