Sarah Sussman's blog

Holding Class at the Harry Ransom Center

Sarah Sussman — Fri, 18 Apr 2014 18:59:55 +0000

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Sarah Sussman

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In the Bad Lands Edward S. Curtis The North American Indian (vol.3)

As graduate students, we know we’re fortunate to work at a university with a world-renowned public archive. We have David Foster Wallace’s papers, the Magnum Archive Collection, and too many other treasured cultural pieces to even begin to name them. We visit the archive to research and become inspired, so why not bring our own undergraduate students to share in the wealth? Thanks to the Harry Ransom Center’s current policy, with careful planning, instructors are permitted to bring their classes to the archive so that undergraduate students can enjoy these same materials. In this post, I’ll share some tips to help my fellow instructors to make the most out of your time should you decide that holding a class meeting in the Harry Ransom Center might add something extra special to your seminar.

My first bit of advice to instructors is to familiarize yourself with proper protocol. If for some reason your area of research has never led you to handle rare manuscripts, books, or photographs, take time to register for an account with the Harry Ransom Center and watch the training video which takes about 20-30 minutes. Be sure to ask staff or librarians on duty for help if at any point you’re uncertain of how a material should be handled. Also, if you’ve handled materials at archives elsewhere, keep in mind that different archives have different policies. It should also be noted that I am in no way affiliated with the Harry Ransom Center, and that these policies may change over time, so you should always check with librarians and staff first.

The thing I would emphasize most to my peers is that holding a lesson in the Harry Ransom Center requires advanced planning. Current policy stipulates that instructors ask to reserve the room one month in advance, and to request visual materials two weeks in advance. You can find more details by checking out the Harry Ransom Center’s website: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/research/forms/rooms/guidelines/

Now that you know the most crucial detail: that you must plan this event at least a month ahead, you’ll want to ask yourself if the visit is truly worthwhile for your particular seminar. For almost any humanities class, I would say that it is, but because the center has strongest holdings in the 20^th century, this might not be the case for those solely studying 21^st century topics, which may or may not be represented in the archive to a level that would be useful to your class. So really, the first step is to assess what you’ll be teaching that day at least one month in advance. The second step is to pick the specific lesson plan which you think would benefit the most from the presence of primary materials.

When it comes to picking out the materials for your class, I recommend that instructors set aside at minimum two hours to look through materials. It will take time for staff to retrieve your request, and to bring it to you. Because students generally would not be permitted to touch things in the room, you’ll need to flag any specific pages of books which will then be left open to the desired page in a cradle on the day of your class meeting. If you plan to use photographic prints or art, remember that these are often stored in large portfolio boxes which you will need to slowly look through, carefully moving one print at a time, until you’re able to locate and flag your desired print. Also, this process is generally enjoyable, so give yourself time to look through all of the rare manuscripts, books, or photographs in fron of you.

In class sessions leading up to the Harry Ransom Center meeting, instructors will probably want to inform students about proper protocol so as to save time once you arrive and ensure everything goes smoothly. Stake out a designated meeting spot and let the group know what to expect in terms of stashing valuables in cubbies, and not bringing food or drink. As you tell them about proper decorum, also be encouraging. In my experience I found that my students (like anyone) seemed impressed by the solemnity of the archive in a way that could hinder discussion. So, it’s important to carefully walk that line between inculcating a sense of expected behavior so as not to disrupt patrons or damage valuable materials, without wasting the student’s cognitive space in a way that would limit free thinking or discussion.

Here I’ll share my particular lesson plan just in case it helps other instructors. For my class “Rhetoric of Photography,” visiting original photographic prints and books was a mid-semester treat. For the big day, I picked a time slot in the middle of our second unit: “Photographing Others” just after our lesson on street photography and in time for our lesson on ethnographic photography. I chose this because I had already seen the Harry Ransom Center’s prints from both Henri Cartier-Bresson as well as Edward S. Curtis, and knew that the center had excellent holdings for both. I prepared a short Powerpoint presentation, rented a documentary on the life of Edward S. Curtis called Coming to Light: The Edward S. Curtis Story to play snippets from, and prepared some discussion questions. It was basically an ordinary lesson plan, but with added time for viewing the original prints, and perhaps more detailed focus on some conversations around authenticity we’d had earlier in the semester, coupled with added attention to the physicality of the prints and the photo-making process, which we hadn’t discussed as much for lack of older photographic prints.

Fortunately, the students seemed to be pretty excited to be around primary materials. So, we started class with a large loop around the whole room giving everyone a chance to get a good look at the materials. That way, they would have a detailed image in mind as we discussed the work, and also would feel that they had time to make a sufficient connection with the artifact. Perhaps the most popular print was one I requested from our first unit on iconic photos, “Migrant Mother.” Students really seemed enthused to see the photo, which led to lots of Benjaminian conversations about authenticity – “here it is!" "The real thing!" "Is it the real thing?” "Is there an original?"

Mostly, I like this assignment, because I think it makes the students feel special. As humanities teachers we walk a line between being custodians of culture and mentors. In that “custodian of culture” role, and especially in the archive, sometimes the artifact itself is the mentor. It’s probably true for most of us that we were inspired to study literature or rhetoric because we felt a connection to excellent professors in our past, but most of us also found this path because (with or without the guidance of a teacher) we felt a connection to authors and artists from before our time (contemporary lit. people, your role is complicated here). As teachers, we never know exactly who we’re teaching, or what poem or image will resonate with a student. Unless we build a lasting friendship, we don’t know what that student will go on to do, or what materials might inspire them to change the trajectory of their career, their lives, or (why not think cosmically?) human history.

Many of us interested in the digital humanities are passionate about accessibility for some of these very reasons. When that archive is already present in your own backyard though, you may as well visit the original. This isn’t to place the digital archives and physical archives in a hierarchy: the two serve a different purpose, one that I don’t mean to limit to convenience or geography. In the past, I’ve found digital archives useful for more interactive plans where the class might mark a text up as a group at the same time, or pull up two editions of the same text on the screen for a quick side by side comparison. In this case, I might prefer to show my students a primary work online, even when it was available in the Harry Ransom Center. Digital archives can be excellent resources in the classroom, but real archival materials are useful for learning about other things. In a class held in a physical archive there are simply different strengths. One can examine the composition of the object: the sheen of a Curtis gelatin silver print which can’t be seen online, the size of the print, or, if you’re superstitious, interested in discussing authenticity, or both – there’s endless merit to merely being in the presence of the object.

Perhaps in a future post I’ll get the chance to say more about the pros and cons of teaching from digital archives vs. physical archives, as I think there’s a lot to be said for the use of both in the classroom.

Using Basic Media Theory to Teach Rhetoric

Sarah Sussman — Fri, 18 Apr 2014 16:14:01 +0000

Author:

Sarah Sussman

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Lens Blog, New York Times

“Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.”

― John Dewey, Democracy and Education

Perhaps like many of my students, it was my art and photography classes that taught me how to close read. How does one draw a chain link fence? Slowly creating each gray line allowed me to think about the fence abstractly. Trying to photograph that same fence from different vantage points similarly changed the whole look of the fence, reinforcing that fences could be metaphors; that photos were constructed and had meaning. The time and attention to detail that art requires pairs naturally well with the kind of microcosmic thinking that close reading and analysis calls for. As instructors, we frequently bank on this dual power that visual media has: to make lessons memorable, and to help students to think about problems more abstractly.

More and more, instructors opt for multi-media lesson plans because they offer an experiential, and thus more impressive example to hold onto. As instructors, we are also frequently telling our students to see things at a remove, to “go meta,” or to remember to pay attention to the meaning of form and the construction of the argument in whatever it is we’re studying. In this post, I’m going to talk about how we as instructors can enhance our use of multi-media tools in the classroom while reinforcing that edict -- to “go meta”-- by using techniques from basic media theory.

One of the most effective ways to do this is to find the same argument across multiple forms of media. Though you could use this technique to teach many aspects of rhetoric, the example I’m sharing in this post is one that I use primarily for teaching ethos in my class, “Rhetoric of Photography.” In class, I show students three different photographers who have published large bodies of work about one topic. In this instance, I focused on three different photographers’ documentation of Hurricane Katrina. The disaster is particularly compelling for discussion because it connects conversations about good citizenship and democracy with visual media, satisfying the Chicago School of media studies’ invocation to use communication and mass media for the good of democracy. It’s also useful because it follows in the edict of the Rhetoric 306 model (the basic introduction course to rhetoric at UT Austin) to teach civic discourse.

The tragic incident is particularly noteworthy when teaching ethos through multiple forms of media because, aside from 9/11, Hurricane Katrina was arguably the most photographed event in U.S. history, and because disaster relief efforts usually raise questions about ethos and ethical behavior for volunteers. In New Orleans, a city where new coming artists are constantly vying for some connection to the organic strength of the local culture, this anxiety to build credibility also becomes evident in the way photographers justify their purpose for working there. This same argument can be traced in the photographer’s interviews, artist’s statements, and finally, the pictures taken of the event.

I begin the lesson by examining the photographer’s personal website where we, as a class, pay attention to fonts used, formatting, and the biography or artist’s statement. I ask the students to draw some conclusions about the photographer’s ethos based on that small sampling and to guess what we’ll see in their interview. Then, we watch an actual interview. After watching the interview, we discuss the form of the interview. We pay attention to the credibility of the station, the location, the interviewer, body language, background music, and other aspects. Finally, we see if we can identify the ethos and throughline expressed in the interview in their body of work.

The three photographers whose work, biographies, and interviews we analyze are Lewis Watts, a professor at UC Santa Cruz whose life work has largely been dedicated to documenting African American culture. Though he lives in California, New Orleans is like a second home and his photos of New Orleans after Katrina mark a continuation of an already sustained presence. Then, we look at Magnum photographer Richard Misrach, whose work focuses on post-apocalyptic landscapes and seeks, in postmodern fashion, to let graffiti speak for his subjects. In his book about Katrina, Destroy this Memory, the only narration is the one created by the graffiti. In the interest of space, I’ll only share a play-by-play of my student’s this semester’s analysis of our final photographer, photojournalist Mario Tama.

Tama’s work on New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is called Coming Back: New Orleans Resurgent. As a class, students were impressed by minimalist style of Tama’s webpage, which they interpreted as a sign of professionalism. They also appreciated that in his description of his book he says part of the proceeds go to charity, but were curious about the exact amount. Noting in his bio that Tama is from New York, students were inquisitive as to how Tama would explain his connection to New Orleans in the interview. Then, we watched a CBS interview with him. We thought about the ethos of CBS as a network, and the outdoor, rainy setting. Overall, the class was skeptical of some clichéd language like “people picked themselves up by their boot straps” and saw his repeated invocation of phrases like “my own people abandoned by my own government” as a way of building the imperative for his presence as an artist and journalist. As a class, the students decided that he tried to establish ethos by proving that his work performed a cathartic, unifying function on a national level, and a humanitarian level. The class identified his throughline as a religiously ambiguous tale of human redemption and resilience, as well as an effort at building his New Orleans ethos through that same sense of national unity.

Then, we looked to the photos to find support for the throughline that we had identified in the interview via attention to visual and compositional elements. I try to pause for as long as possible on each photo to truly exhaust all possibilities for close reading so as to show students just how much they can do and hopefully build up their confidence by showing that a wide array of interpretations can be useful and insightful. Below is our close reading of one photo which we read with the aid of a guide on compositional elements of photography:

The first compositional element we looked at is vantage point. Tama captured the photo (see above) from the same vantage point as the group of men who are victims of the hurricane. Here, we see Tama as a man of the people, belonging, and easily being able to slip into conversation with the people in the photo.

Next, we looked at setting. The setting in this same photo is a coliseum for sporting events, which is something that we associate with the leisure and excess of a prosperous nation. The place for sporting events, also a sign for national unity (i.e. the Olympics) is starkly contrasted against the scene of post-apocalyptic rubble and displaced people.

After that, we pay attention to pattern. The repetitious and orderly pattern of the stadium seats highlights Tama’s point – that a prosperous nation has abandoned its people, as they come into shocking contrast with the organic shapes of crumpled paper, and miscellaneous supplies or debris are strewn everywhere.

Finally, we are free to examine balance. Horizontally, the image is divided into thirds. There are the people on the ground, the empty bleachers, and the more abstract acoustical ceiling. What is most interesting is the way that the slant of light diagonally bisects all of these planes shooting from the upper right-hand corner, stopping at the sleeping man. This beam of light is a sign of the “resilience” Tama talks about. It comes off as a secular or religiously ambiguous symbol of regeneration and hope. In this light, the national space of the coliseum registers as a sacred space, viewers might consider the architectural affinity that this space has with a mega-church, or note the American flag in the upper-right hand corner, again, affirming unity, which Tama used to build his ethos.

For those who are curious, my students’ final takeaway was that Lewis Watts presented a successful ethos through offering gracious credit to his friends (in his bio he mentions his indebtedness to more established New Orleans artists) and repeatedly used words like “humble," and did not focusing exclusively on Katrina, but on the city and people as a whole. His images showed that he had been a part of New Olrean’s culture for some time, and he didn’t make any effort to hide that it wasn’t his birth place but was very up front about the fact that it was a locale he enjoyed visiting. Misrach’s ethos was also ultimately successful for my students because his project was humble in scope. They said they liked Misrach’s ethos because “he didn’t try to do too much” and “didn’t pretend to belong to New Orleans” or to try to play a self-important “savior” to the people of New Orleans, but rather, tried to find an artful way to package graffiti from the people of New Orleans in a way that they still found uplifting. A few students did note that it may have been the cheerful jazz music playing during Misrach’s interview that made us like him so much.

Overall, I think this was a successful lesson plan because it drove the concepts of situated and invented ethos home, and additionally offered a nice bolster of what I mean when I talk about "going meta" by paying attention to not only venue and context when assessing a source’s credibility, but formal and compositional visual elements as well. Ultimately, I think this instilled a new sense of confidence in that students were able to rehearse their knowledge of the interlinking between form and content in a way that they might not have thought about before.

Can I Take Your Picture? Reading Susan Sontag’s "On Photography" and the Rhetoric of Photographing Strangers

Sarah Sussman — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 11:38:17 +0000

Author:

Sarah Sussman

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Photo for "Photographing Strangers" assignment by Josh Guerra

Coupling a reading with a hands-on lesson plan like the one that I am about to share can be tricky, and I wouldn't advocate using this particular pedagogical strategy for all texts, but Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977) seems to work well as part of an experiential lesson plan because peering into the lives of others through photographs on social media sites is what the overwhelming majority of college students spend their time doing already. The main injunction of my course, “Rhetoric of Photography,” is to put an end to passive scrolling through critical analysis, so I like this lesson plan because it asks students take up a tool that they carry every day, the camera, and to use it deliberately, mindfully, and with a cultural critic as their guide.

Preparation for this activity begins one week in advance, when I provide a carefully curated 30-page excerpt of the text. While handing out the reading I tell students that in addition to preparing to discuss the excerpt they should also select one passage in particular to write about in a blog post which will be due the following week. I tell them that I’ll give them more specific instructions the following class, but that for now they should sketch out some general thoughts and reactions to the reading. At this point, I also tell them to bring cameras to the next week’s meeting, saying that I’ll reveal what the cameras are going to be used for on the day of the activity. The mysterious call for cameras is useful for cultivating excitement about the upcoming activity.

For Sontag’s particular text, I find a de-centralized atmosphere, in which the students are made to feel like the teacher, to be most useful. To facilitate this environment, I’ll start with a broad question, like, “would you say Sontag is generally a pessimist, or an optimist when it comes to photography?” and we’ll delve into more nuanced questions from there. Once we've all shared our thoughts and students have shared their chosen passages (this is usually a 30 minute conversation), I’ll explain why they brought their cameras. They’re to go wherever they want in the space of 25 minutes, I tell them, and to use whatever strategy they devise, in order to procure a picture of a stranger. At this moment, they usually express some excitement at the open-ended possibilities and begin brainstorming strategies like so many contestants on a game show. Will they ask nicely? Use a zoom lens? Many liked the idea of pretending to be texting on their iPhones while snapping photo surreptitiously. Some form alliances, while others prefer to go it alone. The only caveat, I tell them, is that they must write about the entire experience and relate it back to a chosen passage from On Photography while incorporating what we’ve learned about rhetoric so far. Finally, their meditation is to be uploaded to our class Tumblr.

For obvious reasons, however, an assignment like this also poses numerous challenges to the instructor and the students. A lot can go wrong when you tell 23 college students to photograph strangers and upload them to Tumblr. Will they be respectful? Will they be conscientious? Is the whole process inherently voyeuristic? It’s a difficult position to be in, but according to On Photography, taking photographs is itself a precarious, and at times, an outright violent pursuit. For that reason, I try to do this assignment towards the end of the term so that students have already taken part in guided conversations about the topics of surveillance, voyeurism, and objectification that we find in On Photography. In this way, rather than giving them space to say or do something that becomes a teachable moment (read: a moment in which they might be disrespectful or hurtful to others knowingly or unknowingly), I give them tools to demonstrate their savviness to conversations we’ve already had about ethics, civic discourse, the gaze, body image, gender and sexuality, race, the precarious nature of ethnographic photography, and other subjects. Essentially, I’m inviting them to think further about social norms, culture, and how (or if it’s even possible) to photograph strangers in an ethical way.

When they have finished with their snapshots, they return to the classroom before or at the appointed meet up time with a lot to say. They’re usually eager to talk about their experience and each other’s photos. Depending on the length of the class, I will have them continue the discussion on Sontag in light of their experience (usually for about 20 minutes). The most important thing I’ve found with re-introducing students to the classroom environment is to remind them of where we left off in our discussion of the reading. A technique that I’ve found useful for connecting their experience to the reading is to immediately have them get out their notebooks and review their chosen passage from Sontag, and begin drafting an outline of their blog post (perhaps for 5-10 minutes). After they’ve done that we’re able to return as a group to the discussion in a more focused manner. In the past, when I had a 45 minute summer class, I had the students write their blog posts at home and then share them during the following meeting – I found both methods were equally efficient.

Ultimately, this hands-on approach is appealing to me because it turns what might have been an otherwise inert text into a more deeply impressed memory. When I look back on my time as a student, the lessons that I remember were the ones which I engaged with on a personal level. In particular, this assignment is designed after a photography class that I took with the inspiring Professor John Grzywacz-Gray who would lead his classes in group photo shoots and art critiques which inevitably led to remarkably productive, free-ranging discussions about the personal interests of students in the class. Because civic discourse and photography will remain with students throughout their lives, I hope the discussion that the “Photographing Strangers” activity engendered will give them the tools to continue this conversation after the semester has come to a close.