Photographies Vol. 2, No. 2, September 2009, pp. 103–115ISSN 1754-0763 print/ISSN 1754-0771 online © 2009 Taylor & Francishttp://www.informaworld.com DOI: 10.1080/17540760903116457

7RPHO1754-07631754-0771Photographies, Vol. 2, No. 2, July 2009: pp. 1–14EDITORIAL STATEMENT

Special Issue on Photography and Education

Editorial StatementphotographiesThis issue of Photographies has been edited from two sources: the proceedings of a sym-posium on photography and education convened by the journal at London South BankUniversity in March 2009,1 co-chaired by Andrew Dewdney, guest editor for thisissue, and Martin Lister, one of the journal’s editors, and a related call for papers.

While the resulting focus on photography and education draws largely on the UKexperience, it is the editors’ hope that the issues discussed in the articles published herewill have a wider resonance. The condition of photography in the twenty-first century,and the social, technological, aesthetic and economic challenges which it faces, will have,of course, local manifestations shaped by different histories, but they will surely alsohave a global dimension. Similarly, changes taking place in the politics and economicsof higher education will be variously configured and at different stages of developmentin different national contexts. But, again, there will be a global dynamics; flows andconnections across and between these local configurations. What occurs in one placemay be on the horizon in another. A crisis or an initiative in one place has repercussionselsewhere and never has this been truer than in a world which is, if unevenly, globallynetworked. Hence the need and the possibility of dialogue and comparative analysisbetween our local experiences of global phenomena.

Behind the symposium lay a recognition that in Britain there is a lack of a sustainedcritical debate in response to changes that have taken place in photography and educa-tion over the last decade – changes that look set to continue. Understanding and manag-ing change has become increasingly urgent as the political agendas of higher educationbecome ever more crowded with policy initiatives, many of which centre on a reduc-tive and instrumental drive to connect knowledge with economic competition. Withspecific regard to photography this sense of urgency is compounded by the hardlyunderstood implications of technical developments in digital image capture, copy, stor-age, circulation and their widespread application in online cultural practices. Such rec-ognitions underlay the call for papers for this issue and formed the agenda for thesymposium.

Another way of looking at this situation is to see that the journal called for enquiriesinto the structures and processes of innovation in government education policy, themarketplace and in industrial production. In this light the symposium can then be seenas generating an initial set of understandings about the impact of innovation as experi-enced by photographic educators, scholars and photographers. From the editorial posi-tion the symposium should be understood as an intervention arising from and directedtowards practice. It was an organized discussion amongst practitioners about the cur-rent state of educational practice in the teaching of photography. What emerges acrossthe presentations, discussion, and the submitted articles is both a considered reflection

P H O T O G R A P H I E S1 0 4

upon the recent history of photography education in Britain and a contemporary snap-shot of the ways in which professional practitioners are seriously grappling with foun-dational understandings of photography.

The contributors to the symposium adopt different strategies and positions in rela-tion to photography as a discipline, ranging from Geraint Cunnick who, in his oral pre-sentation to the symposium, calls for the articulation of a selective tradition, based upondistinguished practitioners, Mark Cocks, who argues for change within continuity in theteaching of photographic composition, to Daniel Rubinstein who sees no conceptualunity in photography and calls for an educational position of inter-disciplinarity. Othercontributors, Helen Jackson and Sarah Edge for example, call for an embrace of a newunitary knowledge domain, which they consider can be provided by media or visualcultural studies, whilst Paula Roush takes the view that theories which acknowledgehybridity prove more fruitful ground for the constitution of relational practices basedupon art, teaching and research. All of the above are strategies for approaching the spe-cificity of the work that the photographic image continues to perform in the world.What is at issue and has currency for this group of practitioners is what constitutes use-ful knowledge in the institutional space of learning how to make photographs.

A strong sense of photography education struggling to respond successfully to, andbeing able to keep up with, overwhelming, externally driven change is readilyacknowledged in many of the contributions and there is more than a sense that photog-raphy education lags behind the practices of photography in society. The view that pho-tography education is on the back foot of change is one of the deeper narratives that thecontributors signal.

Darren Newbury’s own account of the symposium gauges that whilst an estab-lished and received tradition of photography history, theory and practice, “continues toshape the photography curriculum in Britain … the transformation wrought on photo-graphic modes of production, circulation and consumption by digital technology ischanging photography in ways photographic historians and theorists have yet to fullygrasp”. Daniel Rubinstein puts the point more polemically in the opening of his paper:

Photography education knows of no method with which to approach New Mediaimage culture; instead, it attempts in vain to prolong its survival by clinging to thehistorical moment of photography, not realizing that this moment has passed andthat it has nothing to offer to the present besides obsolete judgements and inade-quate interpretations.

Anne Williams assesses the state of current provision and questions the future ofphotography as a teaching discipline. “We might equally well ask for how long specialistphotography courses will continue to exist – the shift into multimedia increasinglyrequires multi-skilled multi-taskers who understand the interactions of media andmodalities rather than just their specificities.”

Helen Jackson’s paper approaches the current state of affairs by looking at whatconstitutes student’s knowledge of photography in digital culture and what this mightmean for teaching paradigms. “The twenty-first-century experience of the photographhas been transformed; the process of viewing, storing and using the photo image hasbecome processual.” In her recognition of such profound change she argues that “issues

E D I T O R I A L S T A T E M E N T 1 0 5

of access, production and consumption of images in the twenty-first century call fornew theoretical approaches and new teaching strategies in photography education thatacknowledge the current status of the image as a social and cultural document.”

Perhaps the common ground in such responses, in the face of the evident speed andscale of the technological restructuring of the industrial, commercial and social repro-duction of the photographic image, should not in itself surprise us. What is more note-worthy in such responses is how little photography education has seriously engagedwith technology, after more than a decade in which academics from a range of disci-plines have theorized the shift from analogue to digital and recognized the social signifi-cance of the Internet.

The reasons for an apparent lacuna or, as some contributors would have it, digitalimpasse are discernable in the analyses offered of photography education’s historicaldevelopment. Three binary obstacles to the reformulation of a forward-looking andleading photography education can be variously detected in contributions to this issue,which are those of education versus training, art versus commerce and theory versuspractice. Anne Williams characterizes the curriculum outcomes of such binary tensions as

new degree courses and variants … spring[ing] up around the country, straddlingmore or less uncomfortably three main tendencies: a semiotics-led and politicizedapproach derived from conceptual art; a generally anti-theory art/documentary/landscape tradition grounded in a history of photography; and a commercial/technical tradition often with a slightly detached history of photography that was ifanything more anti-theory.

This seems a good characterization although, as she goes on to note, hybrid versions ofall three already existed as theory became depoliticized from the late 1980s onwards.

We include an historical paper, drawn from May McWilliams’ PhD research, inwhich she offers an account of developments that took place in British photographyeducation from the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. It contributes a more detailedhistorical account of how individual photographers influenced photography teachingover the period. She traces several lines of development, frequently in tension, whichsaw the teaching of photography as a technically oriented vocational training become a“critical” arts and humanities subject in the new polytechnics. Arguably, this is a historyagainst which current change and debate needs to be seen; a period of liberal and pro-gressive educational reform but one within which the binary oppositions that animatecurrent argument – education/training, art/commerce, theory/practice – werealways present. Nevertheless, McWilliams concludes that the end of her period was apoint at which photography education had escaped the “narrow confines” of vocationalism,had benefited from “theory”, and had gained the status of an autonomous discipline.

What is striking in Anne Williams’ characterization of photography courses, nowthought of as the autonomous discipline, which McWilliams helps us historically iden-tify, is how the radical change in photography’s technological reproduction is left out ofthe account of photography education over the last decade. It is as if photographyconsidered by education is only the idea of photography. Photography appears as anabstraction and a selective historical tradition, rather than as a teeming set of materialpractices, which the focus upon technology suggests. Photography as profane technology

P H O T O G R A P H I E S1 0 6

is constituted once more as the neutral medium, made to carry largely Idealist notionsof photography as a unitary object. Photography education, it would seem, cannotgrasp the very materiality and multiplicity of extant photographies.

A fuller consideration of the materiality of photography would lead, as is identifiedin many of the contributions, to the need to develop a more fully theorized understand-ing of the photograph as constitutive of a range of socio-technical practices. However,one of the brakes upon doing so, as evinced by the accounts assembled here, is the con-tinued preoccupation with what Roland Barthes of Camera Lucida returned to as “thephotograph itself” (Barthes). Whether this is the modernist concern for the photographas the denoted index, the constructed semiotic text, or the postmodernist embrace ofthe photograph as poetic deconstruction, they each remain focused upon the attempt todefine a truth and an aesthetic of the photographic image – in itself.

Serendipitously, Sarah James’s paper, “Photography’s Theoretical Blind Spots:Looking at the German Paradigm”, which was submitted independently of this issue’sthematic call, brings the theoretical debate into sharp relief. James identifies an over-looked but important strand of German photographic theory; one which refuses toditch “the medium’s unique attachment to the real” and insists on a kind of photo-graphic objectivity. In doing so, James reveals how a sophisticated conception of thedocumentary image, of photography’s materiality, and of “photographic seeing” wasforged in both theory and practice. Crucially, for James, this “German paradigm” nowoffers to enliven the impasse in Anglo-American photography theory born of semiotics,post-structuralism, deconstruction and postmodernism. Whilst James does not directlyaddress this issue’s theme of photography education, her article sits squarely within thedebates, which haunt many of the other contributions, about photography’s value, itsmedium specificity and its possible dissolution into a generalized image culture.

What emerges in the context of photography education is largely a set of institu-tional photographic practices which are more or less separated out from the largersocio-technical worlds in which photography is entailed, as Mark Cocks’ reflectionson the teaching of photographic composition attest. Cocks assembles a kind of selec-tive history of progressive principles of photographic composition, which he finds inthe teaching of practical photography. He charts such principles, from the abstract for-malism of Rodchenko through a range of more recent photography, including Billingham,Gursky, Wall and Brodbeck, to his own formulation of digital compositional strat-egies. Cocks’ new principles suggest how the theoretical debate framed in SarahJames’s discussion and characterized in Anne Williams’ brief typology of photographycourses in Britain are translated into practical teaching strategies. Cocks delineatesfour aspects of the new practices of teaching in what he defines as the post-productionspace of “the digital light room”: “reference to the real”, “the extended ‘decisive’moment”, “a projection of fiction” and “hyper-real coloration”. In discussing the changefrom chemical to digital processes in the educational context, Cocks constructs anargument based upon continuity in teaching the principles of photographic practiceand does not see digital technology as representing a radical break. Instead, he sees ahybridity in which “This ‘hybrid’ strategy, and the recognition of digital multi-mediapractices, has raised the profile of photography within the art marketplace and thusprovided academia with an opportunity to focus on educating artists rather than com-mercial practitioners.”

E D I T O R I A L S T A T E M E N T 1 0 7

Geraint Cunnick’s contribution to the symposium extends Mark Cocks’ argumentfor the continuity of teaching photographic principles into a more programmatic view:

It is important to recognize distinct forms of practice and how over time differentinstitutions have advanced distinct responses to the education of photography,drawing on the research interests of staff, the political or geographical structure oflocation or, a desire to ride with the times – to be bold, to be different. With theexpansion of photography education in the HE [higher education] sector in Britainover the last decade, we might now ask whether distinction can still be detectedand sustained within a modern educational context. Educators who were studentsin the 1970s and 1980s were drawn through a smaller network and set of systemsthat produced results either in accordance with, or more often despite, a strict andbounded rationale.

In advancing the continuing value of distinction it is also important toacknowledge that at programme and institutional level distinct traditions have beensomewhat mythologized or re-appropriated when the need has been called for. Inmy thinking, where a genuine lineage can be found then it should be celebrated andmaintained. The challenge for today’s educators is to find a balance, although thereis clear tension in this position, between drawing on distinction in teaching photog-raphy on the one hand, whilst recognizing changed conditions upon the other. Inthe face of fierce competition for students and resources, identifying distinction inthe practice of photography teaching may a basis for defining “quality” and how itcan be maintained. The University of Wales, Newport now has three strands ofPhotography – these seem like “mini brands” drawing on the likes of Hurn2 andArnatt3 and building on their contributions to offer contemporary equivalents.

The long held belief that a liberal arts education can, at its heart, “furnish a life” isseverely challenged in the contemporary competitive climate in which studentswould appear to be grade obsessed and looking for quick fix outcomes. Our gradingis precise, structured, ordered, benchmarked. We find it hard or indeed impossibleto reward distinction in practice or experience as we would witness it outside of thisalpha-numerical matrix. Additionally, has the marked and profound shift in the defi-nition of professionalism within teaching directly affected the quality of the exchange– surely the one element that draws people into the profession in the first place? Theexpectancy of offering professional simulation and a model of a kind of equivalence ischallenging for the institution. More than anything, in practical terms the institution,by its nature, is larger, less nimble and more ponderous. This is the environment thathas nurtured and fertilized the distinctions that we clearly celebrate.

What would the shift to an overriding technology model impose on teachingmethodology? Could a public sector institution find an equivalent procurementprocedure in line with the commercial sector? Clearly not. As cameras, softwareand hardware accelerate and require replenishing on an average of a two yearcycle, what does this mean for the institution that is two, four or even six yearsbehind its technologically savvy “under grads”. Does the institution need industrialor commercial partnership just to maintain and embrace all that is now photo-graphic practice? With this is mind might the role of the institution be one of tem-pering the changes brought by technology, of calming the overload.

P H O T O G R A P H I E S1 0 8

If we return to distinction then perhaps the need to create smaller or moredistinct programme structures – perhaps within larger disciplines – is a strat-egy to retain some specialism. Perhaps this is now the role of the Master’sDegree – to retain that distinction available to undergraduates some twentyyears ago. The retention of distinction and a need for centres of education tocreate, retain and purchase photographic archives, to construct professionalexhibition spaces and offer activity around both, is the key to appropriatingwhat has gone before into what is happening now, and into what might be.Future programme design should not reject or ignore this lineage and be opento a more regional or local response to its own past. Ultimately, this is howdistinction is created.4

In her article, Sarah Edge identifies some of contradictory and limiting outcomes of thisstate of affairs: “I would suggest that this tendency to separate art photography fromphotography’s social and cultural position is a structuring element in this discipline’sresponse to the skills agenda”, which she sees as the unhelpful division between educa-tion and training. For Edge, the embrace of fine art, as the “master narrative” of pho-tography positions the photographer as both intellectual and artist precisely in order todistinguish their authorship from the everyday photographic practices of the commer-cial photographer. Rubinstein expresses this embrace of aesthetics within photographyeducation when he asks: “who controls the image, is it the photographer or is it thecamera?” and goes on to point out that “Given the emphasis on authorship, it is perhapsnot surprising that the subject that gets the least attention in photographic education isthe question of reproduction and copy.” In considering the centrality of reproductionand copy, revealed again more forcibly in digital production, it is not surprising that weare returned to what Rubinstein considers one of the few foundational theoretical textsof photography, namely Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of MechanicalReproduction”.

The inclusion of Sam Habibi Minelli’s discussion of “orphan works”, a term usedfor images circulating on the Internet but where the copyright holder cannot be identi-fied, is highly relevant to the discussion of reproduction and copy and deserves moreattention within photography education. The current state of legal access to, and useof, online photographic and other creative content constitutes a real limit on educa-tional provision and vitiates enormous potential. Minelli’s account of the current stateof intellectual property copyright and the international initiatives currently taking placeto develop a legislative framework is important. His discussion of the obstacles thatremain in the path of any simple resolution to the problem of intellectual propertyrights clarifies what questions need to be asked and gives us a sense of the scale of thechallenge.

In focusing upon the centrality of the reproductive practices of digital imaging it ispossible to trace how contributors point to the need to stabilize photography in whatthey see as an unstable set of conditions. Jackson reminds us of Manovich’s positionwhen she says:

It is interactive image systems that are rendering the digital image as one that istearing apart the net of semiotic codes, methods of display, and patterns of seeing

E D I T O R I A L S T A T E M E N T 1 0 9

traditionally associated with modern visual cultures (Manovich 16–17). Accumula-tive reading perceptions and interpretations in image-sharing environments furtherdisrupt these paradigms and contribute to new discourses which foreground tem-poral, spatial and dynamic interpretations of image texts.

Most of the contributors fully acknowledge and agree upon the significance of “thedigital revolution”, but draw different conclusions from it in relationship to photogra-phy and education. For some, the future requires academics to acknowledge the sophis-tication of students’ online practices; as Jackson puts it: “modes of production andconsumption that are processual, communicative, spatial, temporal and performative”.This is very much the territory of Paula Roush’s ethnographic exploration, whoseaccount starts with the historical archive of Anita Corbin’s girls’ subcultures documen-tation in 1981 and travels forward to document contemporary youth subcultures in reallife, in online communities and in Second Life. Roush’s visual essay illustrates herstudents’ engagement with the subcultural subject, and in her accompanying paper shegives an account of the teaching rationale and method of what she calls a/r/tography,the relational aesthetic of the artist, teacher and research:

My own identities as artist/researcher and teacher (a/r/t) are all allowed to bepresent simultaneously and I encourage the younger student-researchers I workwith to think and act along the same lines. Moreover, “the acts of inquiry and thethree identities resist modernist categorizations and instead exist as post-structuralconceptualizations of practice”.

Other contributors are more cautious about an ethnographic turn towards thelived worlds of their students, seeing in this the danger of an evacuation of the historicalaccumulation of specialist knowledge. We quote here at length from Jim Campbell,who attended the conference:

Writers like Nicholas Bourriaud5 or Henry Jenkins6 have recently discussed thecurrent creative environment as one of “hybridism” rather than discipline special-ism, such that the corpus of previous university disciplines such as photographyface virtual extinction in the face of convergence culture. This position is cele-brated as being empowering and indeed suits a lot of flexible image practice atundergraduate as well as professional level. It is, I think, possible for students/practitioners to master both the still and the moving image for example, but asAndrew Dewdney inferred at some point they need a specific and practical devel-opment that allows them to recognize work of distinction. An intertextual con-noisseurship that enables hybrid management to take place as something other thana shallow and spectacular mash-up is only possible through initial specific practice.The easiest way to do this is to use an extant discourse such as photography. Thisdoesn’t necessarily mean analogue technology, or what a former colleague calls“heritage media”, but it does mean a thorough understanding of the factorsinvolved in picture making.

In the October 2003 issue of the excellent but short-lived Pictured magazineDavid Campany wrote an article called “In and Out of College” that privileged a

P H O T O G R A P H I E S1 1 0

“rare few degree programmes characterized by a questioning, critical and theoreti-cally informed approach”, over almost a thousand university degrees offering someform of photographic content. These rare courses certainly typify the purist posi-tion alluded to above, although they do not entirely define it, since the complexquality of photography cannot be secured by theory. Six years ago Campany sug-gested that his preferred approach places itself at odds with professional practice,but I’m not sure whether that is still the case since the nature of the latter is now sofragmented. If self reflection and informed questioning results in bodies of workthat articulate a unique perspective, commonly through the personal brandingdynamic of the internet, then there is no great paradox any more. Graduates of thistype, assuming they jump the inevitable hurdle of visual competence, are perhapsmore likely to progress professionally than those trained by rote. Conforming toindustry standards is not just pointless it is virtually impossible, but even so theintrojection of professional conventions contributes to a grammar of photographicpractice that is never entirely wasted, since it often improves a student’s ability tocommunicate their ideas. Campany wisely concludes his piece with a denial of thesimplistic opposition that exists between the “critical” and the “commercial”, par-ticularly in light of rising fees and the pressure to make it pay. The difficulty fororganizations such as Skillset is that the skill involved in the production of highquality photography rests more on knowledge and ideas than technique, and per-haps through new technology this is becoming more rather than less apparent.

It would be a shame to think that “our complex moment” of photography hasbeen consigned to the archive. The fine-tuning of photography that has happenedover the past 180 years is still going on and it can play a significant role in sharpen-ing the critical and visual faculties of a new generation. Whereas it is virtuallypointless being too prescriptive as to the contextualization or vocational position-ing of photography, the specificity of its practice, which is often helped by suchconstraints, remains crucial to the critical appropriation of new forms of visualcommunication. Added to this holistic connection between photography as it wasand new media imaging practices there will doubtless be circumstances in whichthe visual poetry of photography, rather than the narrative of film or the viral net-work of the web, will be the most effective means of communicating an idea. Thusthe retention of an intense study of photographic practice remains a pertinent andpotent pursuit.7

The need to insist upon the specificity of historical knowledge, as a strategy to resist thepotential dilution of photography, represented by digital mutability or immateriality, isa theme that runs through a number of contributors. Here Gail Baylis, another partici-pant in the symposium, offers a defence of historical continuity:

Photography has always inhabited numerous institutional sites and cannot be nar-rowed down to criteria of primarily aesthetic valuation or technical training. Thepostmodern-turn did much to dismantle the old head/hand binary implicit inphotographic education (aesthetic/creative/outside ideologies) and technical (training/repetitious/ideological prescribed) but at the same time it set in place its ownsweeping readings of the history of photography that did not acknowledge popular

E D I T O R I A L S T A T E M E N T 1 1 1

usage (Burgin, Tagg et al.). Since then, we have been through the crisis of photo-graphic “truth” propelled by digital technology that has proved more Cassandradoom-ridden than actual, but also in its wake has revealed the shortfall of techno-logically deterministic arguments (both in terms of the reification of the medium asartistic expression and its commercialized aspects, most notably advertising). Hereit is instructive to draw on the distinction between photography and the photo-graphic.

Using “wide brush strokes”, I would signpost the moves since then as being theemergence of visual culture studies (Mirzoeff, 2nd ed. 2009) and most recently amaterial turn to understanding photography (Edwards and Hart, 2004). Theformer has advantages in that it acknowledges that photography as a visual mediumfunctions within a wider scenario of the determinants of a culture of visuality. Butit also has limitations in that it does not acknowledge fully the components of pho-tography that, regardless of technology, make it a specific medium of visual com-munication. For this reason, I teach a first year module entitled “Photography andVisual Culture” and the “and” conjoining is intentional. The ethnographic under-pinning in the emphasis on the materiality of the photograph as a source and site ofshifting meanings is a useful corrective to a focus on production but it in turn canhave a tendency to downgrade the visual. Our students’ engagement with photog-raphy is after all primarily visual. Their understanding of photography is no longerprint-based but framed through the intermediate screens of electronic culture, andto fail to recognize this leaves us producing course structures that lack relevancyfor their understanding of the medium.

We still read images in terms of a photographic literacy so the important taskis to engage students with the photographic (their interface) and those elementsthat are still specific to a photography-learnt literacy. Engaging with the history ofphotography is a salient way to allow students to critique with their own practicesof photography within relevant parameters of historical situatedness. It necessitatesa focus on both aesthetic criteria and an engagement with the popular forms of thephotographic. If we fail to do this we seriously devalue the experiences of our stu-dents, which are profoundly photographic and the best starting point to develop asocially relevant curriculum.8

How and what students should be taught on photography courses, and in particularhow photography education should understand the relationship between theory andpractice, was the subject of the response of another participant, Tine Blom:

Photographs are concepts in the sense that they are visual expressions of thoughtsand ideas which points towards similarities between photography and language. Asemphasized by Sontag (1977) in On Photography, photographs are statements ofwhat is worth looking at and what is not; they are produced by focused attentionand more or less conscious selections. According to Flusser (2000) in Towards aPhilosophy of Photography, humans become subjugated to technology unless theytake a conscious lead of the camera and why they take photographs. With the mul-tiple capacity of production, this challenge is no less for digital photography thanfor the analogue.

P H O T O G R A P H I E S1 1 2

The ontological position adopted is post-realism, that postulates that there isa real world that exists independent of how we perceive it, which photographsare able to document. Surely there is more to say about photography, but this iswhat is referred to by the concept of indexicality, that is, unless manipulatedphotographs are imprints of objects in space at a particular moment in time. Itresembles what Barthes (1980) in Camera Lucida refers to in his concept of stu-dium, and what Kember (2008) in “The Virtual Life of Photography” refers to asthe exterior.

Together, the conceptual and exterior aspects of photography make the cam-era a good tool for expression, exploration and for documentation. However, theepistemological position is that there is a broad range of valid and competing inter-pretation. Theories are tools for systematic inquiry and explanation, and consist ofpostulations of relationships between more or less apparent types, concepts, cate-gories or styles. Rather than being veils that prevent clear views, theories are toolsto sharpen and challenge conceptual ways of thinking and upon this basis critiquedand developed. Here is the point of connection to photography: To visualize con-cepts are among photographers’ basic skill.

In other words, photographic practice should be theoretically informed, andtheory should be challenged through practice. The education should tune down thecontradiction between theoreticians and practitioners, and produce both theoreti-cally informed photographers, and theoreticians with practical skills.9

Gail Baylis and Tine Blom return the debate to questions of syllabus and what should beformally taught, and, along with Anne Williams and Helen Edge, make the case for retain-ing the core of both a history and theory of reading images, against those such as Jackson,Roush and Rubinstein who see semiotics as a diversion from the task of engaging in newmedia ecologies and finding a new body of theory to account for both the technical andsocial structures we find there. Anne Williams argues for a more inclusive view. “We needto be developing theoretical models that allow us to address the mutability of the photo-graph in digital culture while retaining something of the specificity of the photographic.”

But such fine-grained argument about what kind of theory should be developed andtaught and how educational projects engage with student’s immersion in digital cul-tures are overshadowed by a series of recognitions of the wider instrumentalization ofeducational knowledge. Geraint Cunnick rhetorically poses the question: “What is thenature of our students today in this context? The long held belief that a liberal arts edu-cation can, at its heart, ‘furnish a life’ is severely challenged in this contemporary cli-mate of grade obsession and quick fix outcomes.” Sarah Edge identifies clearly therepositioning of higher education by the UK government, signalled by the merging ofthe Department for Education and Skills and the Department for Trade and Industry tocreate the new Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS). She recog-nizes that higher education will be examined and judged on how well it meets a new setof objectives based upon a much more direct transfer of knowledge from the academyto the economy. She notes that

These external measures include the introduction of the QAA benchmarks withinpresent disciplines with a set of key skills and knowledges that are positioned as

E D I T O R I A L S T A T E M E N T 1 1 3

essential for graduates, the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) that assesses thestandard and worth of research undertaken by universities within allocated disci-plines, ranking them and allocating financial support accordingly (current discussionon “impact” as part of the new Research Assessment Frame (REF), defined as the“economic and social impact of research” […]

Sarah Edge is right to direct our attention to what is a reductive managerialismlying behind the skills and knowledge transfer agendas of DIUS, but her view that aprogressive alliance around critical media theory can be forged within the Skillsetagenda is more questionable when she says:

Basically, a culturally informed photographic theory proposes that photography canonly really be appreciated if it is connected to its everyday uses at any one time.This question is not so far removed from the questions being posed by the skillsagenda, which are: what is the role of the photograph and photographer in contem-porary society, and how can higher education help educate students for that role?

Anne Williams contests this and instead suggests:

We need to defend a space for social and critical photography practice of all kinds.It does not necessarily lead to employment of the kind envisaged by Skillset, but itis of great social value, and there are many other ways of utilizing it, not least incommunity arts and education.

Jim Campbell characterized this debate in the symposium when he commented that

Government initiatives suggest that pragmatism is the answer, preparing studentsfor the rigours of the commercial environment. But in the case of photography,this might be something of a cul-de-sac. The utility of the vocational photographycourse, given relatively short shrift by Anne Williams as nothing other than “train-ing” and not worthy of higher education status, is now very much under threatbecause the “industry” that once provided a means of earning a good living forgraduates of (fewer) photography degrees is disappearing. Its distributive unity isfragmenting to such an extent that in commercial terms it survives in small pocketsof established discourse only. The still photograph remains a staple of mass media,and therefore ontologically it keeps its place in the public consciousness. Butnobody wants to pay for high quality considered imagery if post-production caneasily recompense for a lack of photographic training, especially, as Geraint Cunnickpointed out, when technology is bringing vernacular photography much closer totechnical competence.

So where does that leave photography education? Anne Williams concludes that

For now, there is still a role for photography courses, but they must look to thefuture as well as dealing with the present. In which case, all we can do is ensure westay open, flexible and well informed; specialize where there is still a rationale for

P H O T O G R A P H I E S1 1 4

doing so; hybridize where technology demands it; and contextualize to prepare ourstudents for an uncertain future. Of one thing we can be sure: just as in thepresent, the creative industries of the future will require not only graduates whoare practitioners in a specific discipline but also those for whom it is contextualizedwithin a broader understanding of the arts and media.

Building upon Anne Williams’ recognition of the broader context of arts and mediapractices, Daniel Rubinstein recognizes that

As digital images exist both within and outside visual culture, photography educa-tion will have to consider the image as a holistic field, not limited to visual or rep-resentational images. Sensorial, aural, and verbal images are all part of a trans-disciplinary approach to images that will allow photographic education to explorethe digital image.

Notes

1 The speakers were Anne Williams, Geraint Cunnick, Daniel Rubinstein and PaulaRoush. Darren Newbury agreed to act as reporter for the proceedings and attendeeswere also invited to give a short response. The symposium was confined to a halfday and limited in numbers, in order to ensure focused discussion, debate and dia-logue. The proceedings were audio recorded.

List of attendees:

Hynek Alt, Prague Academy of Film and TV School, Department of PhotographyGail Baylis, University of UlsterTine Blom, Lillehammer College, NorwayAnne Burke, Institute of Art and Technology, Dublin.Jim Campbell, University of the West of EnglandMark Cocks, Swansea Metropolitan UniversityGeraint Cunnick, Newport School of Art and Design, University of WalesAndrew Dewdney, London South Bank UniversitySarah Edge, University of Ulster, Director NI Skillset Media AcademyPaul Grivell, Northbrook College SussexHugh Hamilton, Nottingham Trent School of Art & DesignCarol Hudson, Thames Valley UniversityMartin Lister, University of the West of EnglandNatasha LythgoeAdam Murray, University of Central Lancashire.Darren Newbury, Birmingham Institute of Art and DesignAnnabella Pollen, University of Brighton, London College of CommunicationPeter Robinson, Oakham, RutlandPaula Roush, London South Bank UniversityDaniel Rubinstein, London South Bank UniversityClaire Scanlon, Northbrook CollegeConrad Tracy, Arts Institute at Bournemouth

E D I T O R I A L S T A T E M E N T 1 1 5

Aleksandra Vajd, Prague Academy of Film and TV School, Department ofPhotography

Cary Welling, Nottingham Trent UniversityAnne Williams, London College of Communication, University of the ArtsJonathan Worth, Coventry School of Art & Design.

2 David Hurn, Magnum photographer and influential founder of Newport School ofDocumentary Photography in 1973.

3 Keith Arnatt, artist and photographer who taught at Newport School of Art andDesign.

4 This is an edited extract from Geraint Cunnick’s presentation notes.5 Bourriaud.6 Jenkins.7 This is an extract from a longer submission by Jim Campbell post the symposium.8 This is the full text.9 This is an edited extract from a longer submission by Tine Blom post the

symposium.

Works cited

Barthes, R. Paris. Editions du Seuil, 1980.Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. London: Fontana, 1984.Bourriaud, N. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Presses du reel, 1998.Edwards, E., and J. Hart. Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images. London

and New York: Routledge, 2004.Flusser, V. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion Books, 2000.Jenkins, H. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York and London:

New York UP, 2006.Kember, S. “The Virtual Life of Photography.” Photographies 1(2): 205–20.Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2001.Mirzoeff, N. Introduction to Visual Culture. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge,

2009.Sontag, S. On Photography. Harmondsworth, England, New York, Australia, Canada and

New Zealand: Penguin, 1977.