This post pulls together ideas about the value of ambiguity and space in art and education by drawing upon my diverse experiences as educator, artist, and musician. It wanders! In some ways, it is about creating room to wander. I hope you it connects with your own wanderings.
As well as being an educationalist, I am a photographer. Indeed I identify as a creative in general. I am a printmaker, musician, and painter. I don’t usually list these separately – these things connect and make me who I am.
This expression of identity reflects the concept of learning ecologies that helps to explain how unique each of us are. Knowing how our own qualities intersect and combine helps us to understand our students as complex beings with diverse knowledge and motivations.
It also helps to explain the value of collaborative learning – even though we might be denominated as having ‘student’ or ‘teacher’ identities, our differences help to make us interesting and useful to each other.
In this post I reflect on something that has been preoccupying me in one of my alter egos – being a photographer. In this post I consider how my photographer mindset can help me to understand teaching and learning. Specifically, I explore the role of leaving space to create ambiguity thereby allowing for real ‘truths’ to be found by the participant-‘viewer’.
Street photography
Last year I went on a street photography course. Street photography is often gritty and graphic, capturing the human condition as it is played out ‘on the street’.
Photographers such as Henri Cartier Bresson exemplify this rich tradition in photography around life-on-the-edge and the quirks which are observed in street life that reveal universal truths and humanity. At its best, street photography can capture the essence of being human. It can demonstrate empathy, endeavour, resilience, humour, and so forth. Cartier-Bresson and other great photographers have enraptured us with ideas like the decisive moment and the essential joy that epitomises humankind, even in adversity.
However, the best is rare.
I have a huge critique of the trend for street photography. Popular engagement with this trend is usually overly romantic, superficial, cliched, dehumanising, and at its worst, aggressive and exploitative.
A search of the hashtag #streetphotography on Instagram or other social media platforms turns up a plethora of technical excellence and trickery. It also reveals a shallow sense of faux empathy and conviction. It milks human life, lacks real compassion, and generally maintains a distance that pretends to objectivity, but which is often simply unethical reportage and exploitation.
I am intrigued by the trend. I find myself liking striking images on Instagram and I have many books on street photography! I am pulled into it, despite my criticism of it. The use of sensationalism in art, music, printmaking and photography may grab the attention of the viewer or listener (so important in the age of social media), but it also compromises the integrity of the medium and its potential to engage the audience sincerely and profoundly.
The impossible art of being literal
When I was young I remember coming across the concern amongst anthropologists that the Papua New Guinean people they were studying believed that the cameras used by the researchers would steal a person’s soul. To me, then, that was ridiculous and quaint. But I understand now that this is fundamentally a matter of ethics. Street photographers must engage and negotiate with their subjects respectfully. They should not attempt to convey the subject’s essence on their behalf, nor misrepresent them intentionally or unwittingly. Superficial representation is not just and it is potentially harmful. The sensational normalisation of destitute or eccentric people is prolific in street photography: the street, it seems, is fair game for exploitation in the name of picture-making. Venture into public at your peril lest you get snapped up because of your remarkable shadow!
Sensational photography is not new.
On reflection, it was this concern that caused me to leave my first career – in press photography in Belfast at the height of ‘The Troubles’ (1979-83). I worked for an international press agency. I knew the same pictures were being spun differently in every paper in which they appeared. I came to conclude that the pictures I was responsible for added to a noise that amplified and normalised the voices of terrorists and politicians – editorial presentations of extremes that did not represent my understanding of the people who I knew and who lived inside this dangerous media echo chamber – a journalistic simplification which sensationalised, amplified and compounded a false representation of a truly terrible situation. Everyone, including those who lived and died with the Troubles, was treated as media fodder. The question “What side are you on?” plagued me as an adolescent growing up there (I am English and my accent was pronounced) and I came to realise that proliferating images of The Troubles was unethical. So I put the camera down, left the job and joined a rock’n’roll band :-)…
People desire truth and certainty, but I wonder if truth is only really found in uncertainties and complexity. Don’t get seduced by the literal and sensational…
The elusive meaning in Art
As an art student, I was inspired and driven by artists and researchers who made works about the city and working life. At the time, painters like Ken Currie and Peter Howson were beginning to make a name for themselves in Glasgow. Their depiction of city life and trouble seemed to be full of social realistic intent but it left little room for the viewer to contemplate and analyse what was being presented. It was an attractive polemic. I was delighted to find artists who had something they wanted to shout at the world – it was punk. But the shouting spoke of a faux solidarity that did little to stimulate debate. Preaching to the converted, I eventually realised, is largely pointless. Art and education serve us better when they cause us to contemplate incomplete and open-ended situations.
Artists and educators, therefore, invite their audience to be agentic when they leave space and incorporate ambiguity. Doing so creates inviting affordances – invitations for participants and bystanders to be critical interrogators and co-constructors of the work. The artwork or idea becomes a space for participant interrogation. For the educator, ideas and questions accommodate the learner as investigator and interrogator.
The value of ambiguity
Latterly, my response as a photographer has been to create unpopulated photographs and to focus on the urban landscape, just as I earlier painted and made prints of urban landscapes and landmarks rather than the actual people in the city. I wanted the viewer to recall or construct their own urban narratives. At the same time, I turned to printmaking because it was ambiguous by nature and hard to get beyond structure, colour and texture – the meaning had to found by each viewer, in the their time, and drawing upon their individual and unique points of reference.
Including people in artworks can lead one down a narrow literal road that closes out options for the viewer’s interpretation or self-superimposition. It can fall into presenting satisfying narratives that have a simple single truth or moral point. Literal representation excludes the viewer or listener. The work becomes a window for observing a given world rather than a portal for entering it.
The dilemma, then, for the artist and the educator alike is to decide how much should be conveyed and provided as ‘generative constraints’ (Cope & Kalantzis, 2017) and what should be left to the agentic and curious viewer/listener/participant.
Romantic paradox
I am a romantic by nature and this fills me with self-doubt as a creative and educator. Whether as a songwriter, printmaker, photographer, or teacher, my selection of subject, content, method and structure has to satisfy me aesthetically. It is in my nature to look for the good and represent an ideal world or depict a bad world in contrast. I seek to create and offer explanations. I seek to represent a recognisable and desirable truth.
Instead, I know that it is better to leave room for the participant-viewer to delve into dissonances, nuances and complexities so their sense-making instinct can be stimulated and allowed to reveal more about their truth than I could imagine or deliver.
In education, our doubt is that the student understands their role in this and, if they can be persuaded, whether they will know how to do this. Hence, our tendency is to begin filling in the gaps and setting out the detail… The mantra, ‘if in doubt, tell them’ is stubbornly resilient. The art of teaching is not to be didactic, however.
Ambiguity, allegory and absence
A photograph without a human subject leaves a contemplation gap for the viewer or maker. Great stories work when the reader or listener is engaged in anticipating or constructing their own resolution.
So, I have been coming to terms with my diffidence about street photography, its simplified use of dark spaces and shadows, and its tendency to oversimplify representations by preferring black and white over chaotic colour. When the abstract painter Franz Kline painted large white canvases with bold strokes and splashes of black, he was finding his sweet spot for engaging the viewer and our innate desire to construct our own meaning. When the sculptor Ricard Serra created sheet metal mazes, he created ambiguous playgrounds in which the human attempts to respond and understand their situation.
Educators – find your own Franz Kline and Richard Serra within you! How can we create ambiguous spaces that stir our students’ curiosity?
I am happy when there is no central or dominant person in the picture – no explanation or given narrative. Along with this recommitment to unpopulated work is a recommitment to black and white photography – leaving the colour out is working for me too. More attention is given to shape, structure, and only the significant detail. Noise and distractions are reduced. Until… I find rich and vibrant ambiguity in the works of Saul Leiter!
In my teaching, can I address my tendency to fill in too much detail? To leave explanations for my co-participants? It feels that not to do this is disrespectful to the learner.
(And here’s another paradox – the first principle of good teaching is clarity! So be clear about what needs to be clear – and what doesn’t).
Intentional space
I have mantras as an educator committed to active learning – “engagement first, learning will follow”. Recently, as I focus on learning as an outcome of reflection in, on, and through learning, I find myself saying “create space for reflection”, but perhaps I should add, “create space for (self-)discovery.” I think this is good advice for the artist and the educator. In part ‘less is more’, but also allow for dissonance, nuance, and complexity and a person’s innate desire to create resolution.
Reference
Cope, B. & Kalantzis, M., eds (2017). E-learning ecologies: pinciples for new learning and assessment. New York and London: Routledge.
Tactile 