Bend it Babies! A Tool for a New Way of Seeing and Teaching
BY MAIA DERY | APRIL 20, 2006
When I began teaching photography five years ago I was utterly unprepared for how much I would learn every day on the job. Inspiring and instructing students day in and day out has been among the most gratifying and challenging experiences of my life. In a world where imagery is plentiful and can seem cheap, I am continually searching for new ways to keep busy, harried college students impassioned with seeing, experiencing, and creating through their own eyes rather than just consuming the images (and underlying messages) that surround them on all sides. Many of these students are on the edge of being trained out of their youthful sense of discovery and curiosity. But they are still animals driven by instincts that are easy to recognize because, at 40, the abilities that help attract a mate and fit in with peers are no longer central to my own thinking.
As students juggle to prioritize work, newfound freedom, and a busy social life my job, as I see it, is to make sure their creativity doesn’t get short shrift. Most of my students are not art majors who will go on to be professional creatives. For my purposes, I define creativity as the combination of sensory engagement, spontaneity, and the ability to keep in tact the lifeline between work and play that is essential to any meaningful and fully lived life. College art classes, as far as I’m concerned, are a way to bring work and play together. What better than a photography course to teach that discipline and hard work do not always mean buckling down but can instead lead to opening up? That engaging their senses and abilities to work for joy and beauty and excellence is not only a means of succeeding in an art class but is also a good metaphor for living.
I suppose all teachers struggle a bit with how much of their own standards and criteria they should pass on to their students. These questions are particularly thorny in the face of emergent technologies that can sometimes easily compensate for a lack of attention to minute detail that once distinguished excellent darkroom practitioners. With a view camera and a vision that’s a bit stodgy, and reverential where reality is concerned (almost downright 19th Century!) I wonder how much of the old craft I spent years mastering is still useful to these kids.
For the time being my answer is that, as long as I can still find supplies, I think the slow, delayed gratification and hard work necessary for success in the darkroom is a good base for moving forward. The students who fall in love with the darkroom continue independently. But what about the ones who don’t? And how to I maintain the impulse to play in all of them when the tediousness of the months of darkroom work is greater than that of the rest of their fast-paced lives?
Enter, the Lensbaby.
Initially I was not excited about this new toy, the latest gimmick. I wondered why the post-Photoshop world really needed a plastic, bendable lens that can throw the plane of not-quite-sharp focus around with the push of a finger? Aren’t the students overwhelmed with the post-shooting possibilities for alteration and distortion already? I have often felt that they are. I have come to love using the Lensbaby in the classroom.
As the effort to encourage my students to thoroughly learn technique and craft (in short, the rules) and then use them to go out and find their own vision (and make their own rules), the Lensbaby has been a godsend. It is a new tool, a new way of seeing that’s part of both the old tradition (you have to do it right the first time so what you shoot is what you get) and the new (the joystick like lens and instant feedback of the digital image are reminiscent of a video game).
Using the Lensbaby requires hand-eye coordination of a type not required by photographers since they gave up their Leicas for auto focus. The imprecise nature of using the Lensbaby makes it difficult to encumber with precise expectations. I have found particular success in combining Lensbaby use with the study of the tradition of street photography. Students and I take field trips downtown to the local independent coffee shop and prowl around looking for good light and images. The Lensbaby has view-camera like possibilities for distortion but these can be accomplished in a split second, in a moment’s reaction to visual stimuli. That possibility of a wider range of visual reaction, of interpretation and rendering in an area not yet defined by rules has only enhanced the sense of play and discovery offered by the tools of tonal placement, depth of field, and shutter speed.
We all work at a time when it’s impossible for any one teacher in the photographic world to be a master of this increasingly rich and complicated medium. While it’s easy for those of us who come from a more traditional means of photographic seeing to feel overwhelmed, this is a moment of tremendous opportunity to learn new skills alongside our students. Sometimes, instead of adding to an already steep and dynamic learning curve, a new technology can help us cut through the din and take us closer to who we are and what we were without it. Sometimes a new, plastic, bendable lens can put us in the privileged position of an excited student, flush with possibility and creativity at the same time we reach the place of the instinctive animal reacting to its environment with its senses acute, muscles loose and responsive body, skills, and eyes doing what photography is all about—seeing the familiar anew.
Lessons
Lensbaby Assignment 1
Take the Lensbaby and a digital SLR out with a friend. Find a horizontal line such as the edge of a sidewalk, railroad tracks, a building, etc. Make an initial series of Lensbaby photographs as your friend walks along the straight line from left to right across your field of vision. Save all of this series regardless of how out of focus it is or is not. Now position yourself at one end of the line and take a series of shots as your friend walks towards and then past you, again bending the Lensbaby and the plane of focus with each new frame. Repeat each of these series, alternating one after the other, a total of at least 3 times. Save all of the images—mistakes or not.
Lensbaby Assignment 2
Now that you have a feel for what the Lensbaby effect looks like and how it changes the compositions and mood of your images. Each time you’re in the lab with fresh film in your camera check out a Lensbaby for 10 minutes and use it to shoot one or two frames. Shoot these within 15 yards of the art building. Select as your subject something you pass every time you come into the building. Try to see it in a way that is a) evocative of a particular mood (perhaps the mood you have when you are headed into the basement for hours of darkroom effort?) and b) a way you would not see it without the Lensbaby.
Lensbaby Coffee Shop Assignment
On this trip to the local cafe let’s all do the things people do at a coffee shop! Before we leave, make a list of everything you normally do in the coffee shop. Stand in line, order coffee, interact with the cashier, pour cream and sugar, sit in a booth, glance at the artwork, perhaps fire up a laptop, sit and watch other patrons, etc. This will be your shot list for the day. Do each of your routine tasks through the Lensbaby. What can you communicate about the place and how you feel about it or, most importantly, how you see it.
Maia Dery teaches photography at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina. She received a Masters degree in Liberal Studies from Duke University and a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has studied with several photographers but swears her creative education was largely accomplished by the ecstatic observation of stuff she would otherwise be stepping on. Her work has been shown in galleries in North Carolina and California and has been featured in books, magazines, and journals. Her first book, An Adventure Guide to the Triangle, was published in 1995. www.maiadery.com
