Photography Students Research Articles

Quick, Quick, Slow: Making Time for Sustainable Photography Practices in Contemporary Higher Education

AbstractAs environmental awareness grows, so do questions about the environmental impact of photography, in particular traditional film development and processing, which includes the use of plastics, gelatine and other environmentally harmful chemicals notwithstanding water usage and waste. Pioneering practice and research into sustainable alternatives to conventional processes has quickly established, supported by organisations such as The Sustainable Darkroom. Students in Higher Education are environmentally aware and prepared to take action to mitigate their impacts where possible. As such, there is a coalescence of perceptions within and beyond the classroom which asks to be addressed in the curriculum. This paper draws upon the research project Under a Green Light: A Darkroom for the Future which investigated how university darkroom practices can pivot toward more environmentally friendly methods. The paper describes the learning environment of the darkroom as a space of slowness, immersion and experimentation and the pedagogic value of this for photography students. The paper argues that incorporating environmental awareness into day‐to‐day teaching through systemic changes to process and practice, rather than through short term curriculum interventions, contributes to transformative learning experiences and promotes positive long‐term change.

A DEVELOPMENT OF WEB-BASED INSTRUCTION ON PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY FOR SECOND YEAR PHOTOGRAPHY STUDENTS STIONING

This research was to develop of the web-based instruction on Portraits photography for second-year photography students of Visual Communication, Photography major, Faculty of Architecture, King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang in total of 25 people using a one group pretest-posttest design with measurements before and after using the experiment. The results showed that web-based instruction had overall quality in good level (x̄= 4.39, SD = 0.40). The quality of content was at a very good level ( = 4.50, SD = 0.35). The quality of media production techniques was good ( x̄= 4.27, SD = 0.47). Web-based instruction about portraits photography has an efficiency of 89.75/85.70, which is higher than the 80/80 as set criterion, second-year photography students, Faculty of Architecture, King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang with higher learning achievement after studying than before. It has a statistical significance level of 0.05. The results could be concluded that the web-based instruction about taking portraits developed for second-year photography students, Faculty of Architecture, King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang, can be used in teaching, resulting in higher learning and achievements.

Examining the Tim Hetherington Collection Through Visually-Led Public Engagement Workshops

War photography scholarship tends to focus attention on photographers’ lives and the thematic content of images. This study shifts the spotlight onto how varied members of the public respond to a body of work, in this case the photography and filmmaking of Tim Hetherington (1970-2011), whose archive the Imperial War Museum (IWM) obtained in 2017. We discuss findings from a number of visually-led focus groups with refugees, veterans, military family members, photography students and museum volunteers. Together we examined his image-making process with the groups to discover how they discussed notions such as intimacy, masculinity, the ‘good’ conflict photograph, and ethical dilemmas. We argue that engaging with multiple public perspectives through visual elicitation methods enhances curatorial knowledge and understanding of image-making practices in this specific context, whilst also offeringt insights for national museums more broadly on how dialogue with diverse communities can enrich the handling and display of new collections.

Indianness in Photography

This article explores the question whether there is a specifically Indian style of photography. A survey of photography students from various institutions revealed that though there is little clarity about the actual look of an Indian style of photography, students clearly define their own photographs as Indian. Intriguingly, the focus is less on certain visual characteristics, but more on the feelings they derive from the photographs, a scenario which is reminiscent of the rasa theory. Even though this was hardly mentioned by the students, this psycho-social element seems to have left a cultural imprint but also reflects an act of claiming ownership and agency. In addition, the students identified alienating aspects in photography, such as seeing one’s own culture like an outsider, but at the same time consider it to be integrating, since photography paves the way for a deeper engagement with one’s own culture, and as such strengthens Indianness.

Analisis Faktor Holland Career pada Ketertarikan Food Photography Unit Kegiatan Mahasiswa KOPPI (Komunitas Photography Pancasakti) di Masa Pandemi Covid-19

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of Holland Career on students of UKM KOPPI Tegal on the choice of the career based the type of personality expressed in the theory was in accordance with their study and activities of the photography students they were undergoing. The method used is quantitative pre-experimental, one shot case study design, used a Likert scale and data analysis with SPSS & manual calculations on the Pearson Product Moment Correlation. The use of the Jung Typology Test was carried out to obtain qualitative data as interpretation and observation of 15 respondents. The results showed that the Holland Career scale analysis test on Food Photography interest showed mostly invalid results, meaning that Holland Career scale analysis had no effect on interest Food Photography. However, the Jung Typology Test, which is part of the Holland Career test, shows a match in their study and shows a high percentage of their interest in food photography, which focuses on artistic, enterprising and conventional. The Holland Career has a significant effect on career choices in the their study and hobbies from the student activities they carry out, namely Photography.

PEMBUATAN PORTOFOLIO DIGITAL REPRESENTATIF PADA MAHASISWA/I PROGRAM STUDI FOTOGRAFI POLITEKTIK NEGERI MEDIA KREATIF

ABSTRACT Photography needs are now a part of daily activities, because the images that are produced can be used directly in expressing buying and selling activities and activities on new media. This phenomenon is a great opportunity for Creative Media State Polytechnic Photography Students. But the problem is that not many Photography students know the procedures for making a good or representative digital portfolio to be displayed in the online media for promotion of Photography Services. For this reason, this research has produced a representative digital portfolio for every photography student in order to increase the selling power to users of photography services both online and offline. This research uses a method with a qualitative approach. Data collection was also carried out by pretest and posttest control as a measuring tool for the success of the socialization of digital portfolio creation and literature study. The results of this study can be the basis for creating a digital portfolio as well as providing benchmarks for the marketing of Photography Services. Keywords: Photography, Digital Portofolio, new Media

Photography Theory's Metamorphosis into Theories of the Virtual Image

If there ever was a founding father of photography theory, and if that did not sound terribly patriarchal (and an insult to the very feminist preoccupations manifested in his work), this person would be the artist, writer and professor Victor Burgin. As editor of the 1982 collection of essays and key text for photography students Thinking Photography, Burgin boldly called for and inaugurated a systematic critical theoretical approach to the domain of the most everyday, democratic and banal means of image-making: photography and the ubiquitous photographic image. His démarche has been not only written down, but eminently visual as well: over the past fifty years, Burgin has not ceased to question and expose pre-formatted modes of representation, both in his writings and in his artistic work, while tirelessly inventing forms for what he calls “psychical realism”, seeking to represent the psychic reality of human perception. From the relative remoteness of our rural locations in France and Greece respectively, Burgin and I met for this interview in cyberspace, i.e. by email. Always attentive and approachable despite his infinite, intimidating erudition, Burgin discusses the sweeping changes in photography brought about by technology, and virtuality, which is, after all, ancient property of the image. His perspective is that of an intellectual equipped with a virtual camera in cyberspace, which keeps him astoundingly at the forefront of what we still call “photography”.

Os selfies e o corpo tombamento: reflexões a partir de uma autoimagem sonora

O presente artigo faz parte de uma pesquisa-formação que aconteceu na Escola de Arte e Tecnologia Spectaculu, no ano de 2016, com 29 estudantes de Fotografia e Tratamento de Imagem, na disciplina “Olhar”, que possui o objetivo de potencializar suas experiências estéticas. A metodologia de pesquisa-formação (MACEDO, 2000; JOSSO, 2004; SANTOS, 2002) se desempenha de forma criativa, buscando se debruçar sobre a experiência educativa para produção de novos conhecimentos e abordagens. E, nesse encontro, o termo ‘tombamento’ ficou cada vez mais evidente, a partir de um dispositivo usado em sala de aula, chamado ‘Autorretrato Musical’, que se trata de uma autoimagem conectada a uma música. O processo deste dispositivo se divide basicamente em três etapas: desenho de si e escrita de suas redes de formação; falar sobre si e escutar o outro; criação e produção da autoimagem sonora. O objetivo deste artigo, portanto, visa tratar sobre essa experiência, transando relações da noção de ‘tombamento’ com efeitos de presença e sentido debatidos pelo autor contemporâneo Gumbrecht (2010). Conclui-se que o ‘tombamento’ é um manifesto ético-estético em si, ou seja, no próprio corpo da geração contemporânea, composta por uma juventude ‘afrontosa’, que se formou na/com a periferia e a internet, criando novas narrativas e referências para os seus e ganhando novos espaços de ação, que foram apropriados pelas mídias massivas e alvo de muitas críticas. Mas, para vivencia educativa e para pesquisa formativa, o processo de criação de si e a reinvenção das formas de fazer são combustíveis indispensáveis.

Rephotography for photographers: discussing methodological compromises by post-graduate online learners of photography

Rephotography involves making one or more pictures of the same subject in order to repeat an existing image, usually to show change. Recognized early on as a rigorous visual method for natural sciences, rephotography in popular culture has grown into a popular visual strategy of displaying images of the past within or alongside images of the present, but such images cannot alone explain events that led to their production. While any methodological compromises in scientific applications are usually held to account, the act of rephotographing – as a common and varied set of practices within visual culture – faces far less scrutiny. Focusing on the presence of rephotography in photography education, this paper reports on responses to an explicit rephotographic task given to students of an online MA Photography program and considers compromises regarding two aspects seen as methodologically fundamental: the accuracy applied in revisiting a previously made image and the depth of exploration undertaken in response to it. In doing so, it supports the notion that rephotographing as a way of learning through looking at and making images is vital for the visual literacy of photography students.

Investigating the relationship between college students’ views of reality and their usage of photographic manipulation

Abstract Some photography students choose to manipulate their photographs with computers to come closer to expressing their vision; others, despite having the option to modify their photographs, avoid post-editing and leave their photographs as is. Prior research has suggested that artists’ epistemologies are manifested in their artwork; this study investigates how the views of young college students or the so-called Generation Z regarding reality lead to their manipulation styles in photographs. This study presents four college students from my photography manipulation classes from 2013 to 2015. It describes their work, interprets their layers of reality and seeks relationships between their views and work. The study provides philosophical grounding for students’ choices of style, which have implications for how manipulated photographs can be studied and how photographic manipulation can be taught.

Photographer’s Images Reach Out Across Half a Century

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Association NewsFull AccessPhotographer’s Images Reach Out Across Half a CenturyAaron LevinAaron LevinSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:3 Jan 2017https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2017.1a26AbstractA dive into the archives of Psychiatric News finds that a picture can replace a plethora of words. This article is part of a series marking the 50th anniversary of Psychiatric News.A group of children pulling sleds in the snow. A teenage boy standing alone as ghostly, blurred figures pass in the background. A girl running through tall grass. Another in sunglasses on a rainy day. Children exploring a beach, backlit by a sparking sea. A girl leaning against a white marble sculpture of a mother and child. Is she sad or comforted? The ambiguity only adds to the allure of the photograph.The series of evocative images appeared in 1966 and 1967 in Psychiatric News in advertisements for New York’s Psychiatric Treatment Center for Adolescents. Each included a single, black-and-white photograph with—unusual for an advertisement—a credit line for the photographer: Arthur Leipzig.Leipzig, a native New Yorker who lived from 1918 to 2014, had dropped out of high school and was working in his uncle’s glass factory when someone suggested that he visit the Photo League, a photography collective that also taught the craft and art of image making. The Photo League was an incubator for many documentary photographers in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, today seen as a golden age of the genre.“That changed his life,” his widow, Mimi Leipzig, told Psychiatric News. “He said, ‘When I walked in there, I knew that’s what I was going to do.’”Leipzig eventually got a job on the socially conscious newspaper PM, famous for using photography generously and for allowing its photographers great creative leeway in their choice of subjects. He later worked for International News Service before becoming a freelancer. For three decades, he taught generations of photography students at Long Island University.For more photos, click here.©Estate of Arthur Leipzig, Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New YorkSome of Leipzig’s most enduring photos are of young people at play on the streets of New York, images that preserve a memory of a now-bygone city. In 1996, the Museum of the City of New York mounted a solo exhibition of his work focusing on that age group called “Growing Up in New York.”None of the young people in the ads were patients. Leipzig occasionally used his children and their friends as models in his photographs, some of which were used in the ads for the Psychiatric Treatment Center, said Mimi Leipzig. “Our daughter was a very good actress.”The Psychiatric Treatment Center was an inpatient facility on East 80th Street, founded in the 1960s by three psychiatrists: Julian Barish, M.D., George Naumberg, M.D., and Bruce Buchenholz, M.D. It closed in the 1980s, and the building is now a home for people with dementia.The center’s treatment model was called Program Therapy, recalled Gretchen Buchenholz, M.A., the widow of Bruce Buchenholz, in an interview.“Because teens were not so good at talk therapy, the idea was to have therapists engage them in sports and hobbies they enjoyed,” she said. The teens could choose from activities like woodworking, horseback riding, bowling, sailing, skating, bicycling, sewing, painting, boxing, weightlifting, and others. The therapists would use the activity to reinforce the psychiatrists’ treatment plan, said Gretchen Buchenholz. “The children’s activity became a kind of metaphor for what they were struggling with internally.” The psychiatrists and the photographer became close.“Arthur was creative, artistic, sensitive, and kind,” Buchenholz said. “He understood human beings and was able to express that in his art.” ■A selection of Arthur Leipzig’s photographs is posted on the website of the Howard Greenberg Gallery. “Program Therapy for Inarticulate Adolescents” by Joseph Zacker, M.A., and Bruce Buchenholz, M.D., appeared in Psychiatric Services in September 1967. ISSUES NewArchived

Conference raises money for local charity

In line with the Conference theme ‘Investing in the Future’, we invited Brighton and Hove High School Sixth Form photography students to photograph delegates and speakers at the event.

Fotografiarse, retratarse, expresarse. Fotografía y expresión de los personal en adolescentes.

Los lenguajes visuales son imprescindibles en el aprendizaje actual. Permiten conocerse, se convierten en un elemento fundamental que explorar para la construccion de la identidad personal. El ambito del lenguaje fotografico, resulta un espacio perfecto para la visualizacion y produccion de autoexpresiones de la propia identidad, especialmente en la etapa de la adolescencia. Describimos una experiencia en el aula de autoexpresion, busqueda y descubrimiento del cuerpo a traves de la fotografia con alumnos y alumnas de 3o de la Ensenanza Secundaria. Pretende reflexionar sobre la relacion entre el arte del retrato fotografico y la autoexpresion.

The Enduring Fragility of Chemicals and the Software Aesthetic

This paper considers the emergence of a digital aesthetic within the work of contemporary photography students. Despite the continued promotion of traditional chemical teaching and learning environments within the majority of higher education photography departments, more and more of these students select digital strategies for their final exhibition work and portfolios. To investigate this phenomenon I propose a set of principles that demonstrate an emerging digital compositional style. These examples illustrate the essence of the contemporary digital aesthetic that appears to override the possibilities of analogue practice for the current generation of photography graduates.

Re‐visioning Science “Love and Passion in the Scientific Imagination”: Art and science

The often portrayed media image of the scientist is a rather strange one, grim‐looking scientists, usually male, poised beside incomprehensible instruments. It is little wonder that we encounter the stereotype of the bespectacled scientist; thick black rims, coke bottle lenses, roman sandals, dressed in lab coats, trousers up to their necks. A qualitative study designed to produce a series of visual and oral narratives based on the everyday lived realities of “the contemporary scientist” was undertaken. The study was a participative project in which a research team, including the project leaders Anne Noble and Michelle Lunn, together with research assistants and documentary photography students, worked alongside scientists to produce contemporary and deliberately challenging stories of “the scientist”1. In this paper, the most pervasive theme to emerge from the research, the link between art and science, is discussed.

Theory and Practice in Photography

The relationship between theory and practice in BA art, media and design courses, is often cited as being a crucial aspect in distinguishing how ‘education’ is different from ‘training’ in higher education. Yet what do students understand by this relationship and how does it make itself manifest in students’ work? This article attempts to unravel and analyse the different conceptions that undergraduate students of photography have about the nature and relationship of theory to practice in making their own work, as they move through their course of study. Influenced by phenomenology, the author attempts to interpret these different conceptions in relation to different learning approaches that students adopt. The article concludes by asking to what extent do we as lecturers understand how our students come to reach this range of understandings, and if so, are they the understandings we intend them to gain?

Decisions and revisions: The affective forecasting of changeable outcomes.

People prefer to make changeable decisions rather than unchangeable decisions because they do not realize that they may be more satisfied with the latter. Photography students believed that having the opportunity to change their minds about which prints to keep would not influence their liking of the prints. However, those who had the opportunity to change their minds liked their prints less than those who did not (Study 1). Although the opportunity to change their minds impaired the postdecisional processes that normally promote satisfaction (Study 2a), most participants wanted to have that opportunity (Study 2b). The results demonstrate that errors in affective forecasting can lead people to behave in ways that do not optimize their happiness and well-being.

Photolanguage: How Photos Reveal the Fascinating Stories of Our Lives and Relationships

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book Forum: PhotographyFull AccessPhotolanguage: How Photos Reveal the Fascinating Stories of Our Lives and RelationshipsLAWRENCE HARTMANN, M.D., LAWRENCE HARTMANNSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., Cambridge, Mass.Published Online:1 Dec 2001https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.158.12.2098AboutSectionsView EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail No one needs coffee table books, but a lot of us enjoy them. What makes a good coffee table book? Many different things for many different people, I suppose. My preference is usually for some large engaging pictures, some beautiful and some at least a bit surprising, plus some but not too much text, both instructive and entertaining; some but not too much challenge; and a combination of both familiar and unfamiliar things. Photolanguage, a book by a psychoanalyst about looking at photographs, though less opulent than many coffee table books (no color, except on the cover; no full-page photos), will probably strike many readers of this journal as a pretty good coffee table book. It may also serve some students of photography as a pleasant and not too deeply psychoanalytic study of some meanings in photographs. “My premise,” says the author, “is a simple one: there is more going on in most photographs than we usually see.”Akeret may have taken some inspiration from Ruskin, who, with his looking at art and nature and eloquently and carefully commenting on what he saw, is perhaps coming back into fashion. Ruskin said such things as, “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way.” Akeret is interested in the uses of photographs in looking and seeing, in life and, on occasion, in psychotherapy. His book is far more about meanings than about aesthetics, and he considers multiple meanings, e.g., meanings conveyed by the photograph’s subject (if the photo is of a person), by the photographer, and by the observer of the photograph. One might, I think, add to this list the publisher or boss of the photographer and the purchaser or user of the photo, since so immensely much photography now is photojournalism and advertising.Akeret as a guide is pleasantly perceptive, capable of humor, and not too dogmatically sure of himself. “Do not always expect to agree with my interpretations. In fact, if you do, I will not have taught you well.” To my mind, Akeret is an imperfect guide; he sometimes cheats a bit, and I think he does not quite give due weight to cultural and temporal context, but on the whole he is worthwhile and instructive, and he makes useful choices of illustrative photos. His major organizing themes seem to me to be time, power, passion, seduction (loosely defined), and identity. The photos are mostly from the past 10 or 20 years, making cultural context relatively easy for many viewers; few if any are from before World War I. Rather a lot of them are of famous people, e.g., Marcello Mastroianni, Michael Jordan, Joe DiMaggio, Monica Lewinsky, the Clintons, Woody Allen and Soon Yi, Prince Charles and family, Judy Garland, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Janet Reno, Bill Gates, Hitler, Charles DeGaulle, Mao, Frank Sinatra, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Marlene Dietrich, Princess Diana, Marilyn Monroe, Laurence Olivier, Danny Kaye, Elvis, F.D.R. and family, Arafat, O.J. Simpson, Nadia Boulanger and Leonard Bernstein, John Paul Getty, Mario Cuomo, Marian Anderson, Josephine Baker, Winston Churchill, Eugene O’Neill and family, and Mayor Giuliani and Donna Hanover. Many are of ordinary people. Some are of people in emotional moments, some not. Some are of individuals and families seen in more than one photo, over time.One of my favorites is of a major tobacco executive testifying at a Congressional inquiry: intense in itself and plausibly showing conflict. Another, much more peaceful, is of two Depression-era children sadly pushing a load of firewood along a country road. Of interest to knowledgeable APA members will be one of the powerful men behind then Attorney General Janet Reno in her photograph.Photolanguage will help some of us to look better at photographs, at people, and even at our patients. It is a pleasant and instructive book to look at, to read, and to give to friends.By Robert U. Akeret. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 2000, 240 pp., $29.95. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 158Issue 12 December 2001Pages 2098-2099 Metrics History Published online 1 December 2001 Published in print 1 December 2001

The Brazilian Photographs of Genevieve Naylor: 1940-1943

In the early 1940s as the conflict between the Axis and the Allies spread worldwide, the U.S. State Department turned its attention to Axis influence in Latin America. As head of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Nelson Rockefeller was charged with cultivating the region's support for the Allies while portraying and its neighbours as dependable wartime partners. Genevieve Naylor, a photojournalist previously employed by the Associated Press and the WPA, was sent to in 1940 by Rockefeller's agency to provide photographs that would support its need for propaganda. Often balking at her mundane assignments, an independent-minded Naylor produced something far different and far more rich - a stunning collection of over a thousand photographs that document a rarely seen period in Brazilian history.Accompanied by analysis from Robert M. Levine, this selection of Naylor's photographs offers a unique view of everyday life during one of modern Brazil's least-examined decades. Working under the constraints of the Vargas dictatorship, the instructions of her employers, and a chronic shortage of film and photographic equipment, Naylor took advantage of the freedom granted her as an employee of the U.S. government. Travelling beyond the fashionable neighbourhoods of Rio de Janeiro, she conveys in her work the excitement of an outside observer for whom all is fresh and new - along with a sensibility schooled in depression-era documentary photography of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, as well as the work of Cartier-Bresson and filmmaker Serge Eisenstein.Her subjects include the very rich and the very poor, black Carnival dancers, fishermen, rural peasants from the interior, workers crammed into trolleys - ordinary Brazilians in their own setting - rather than simply Brazilian symbols of progress as required by the dictatorship or a population viewed as exotic Latins for the consumption of North American travellers. With Levine's text providing details of Naylor's life, perspectives on her photographs as social documents, and background on Brazil's wartime relationship with the United States, this volume, illustrated with more than one hundred of Naylor's Brazilian photographs will interest scholars of Brazilian culture and history, photojournalists and students of photography, and all readers seeking a broader perspective on Latin American culture during World War II.Genevieve Naylor began her career as a photojournalist with Time, Fortune, and the Associated Press before being sent to Brazil. In 1943, upon her return, she became only the second woman to be the subject of a one-woman show at York's Museum of Modern Art. She served as Eleanor Roosevelt's personal photographer and, in the 1950s and 1960s became well known for her work in Harper's Bazaar, primarily as a fashion photographer and portraitist. She died in 1989. Robert M. Levine is Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies at the University of Miami, Coral Gables. He is the author of many books on Latin American history, including Images of History, also published by Duke University Press.From reviews of Faces and Places in Brazil, Genevieve Naylor's 1943 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art: 'A superb collection of Brazilian photography. ..Faces and Places in Brazil ...is a must see' - New York Times. 'The product of an immensely sophisticated artist' - San Francisco Chronicle. 'Miss Naylor captures the feeling, flavor, joy, pathos of all the blending cultures ...of this fascinating nation' - San Francisco Examiner.'Genevieve Naylor was one of many Americans, including Orson Wells, Walt Disney, and Errol Flynn dispatched to to help strengthen the war-time alliance. Her photographs, perhaps the largest surviving body of work portraying the country during the war years, concentrated on ordinary people and captured their everyday struggles, optimism, and inner spirit. Robert M. Levine's sensitive and intelligent introduction and wonderful sampling of Naylor's work are sure to delight photography enthusiasts and historians' - Colin M. MacLachlan, Tulane University.

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

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.