Talking about Practice: photography students, photographic culture and professional identities

Abstract

Despite the social and cultural importance of photography in modern societies, photographic education is an area that has inspired very little in the way of academic research. Photographic education is generally perceived in very narrow terms, as an area of technical training, lacking any broader intellectual significance. It is the argument of this paper that in his/her many guises the photographer is an important figure in contemporary culture, and that the impoverished, or total lack of, understanding of photographic education is a significant omission. The aim of the paper is to begin to address this gap through a qualitative look at the way in which professional photography students talk about their practice. It is argued that photographic education has its own professionalised discourse, which students are encouraged to adopt, thereby excluding alternative perspectives. I discuss examples of students’ talk about practice as evidence of this discourse. In the final section of the paper I consider some alternative approaches that have been developed outside the context of mainstream photographic education, and the possibilities they offer for rethinking what it means to teach photography.