After a Summer which has felt like an eternity, Fall semester starts up this week at one of the universities I teach at and I’m making the slow steps into opening back up the muscles of teaching and learning that in the months since May have dried up a bit.
In preparing for this year I’ve been thinking of last. This will be my first semester since I started working as an adjunct professor that I’m not teaching at Stern College for Women in New York, where I taught photography and video and ideas around the two for four years and grew to have enormous affection for the students while doing so. This past Spring I taught an especially wonderful group in a class called “Ways Of Seeing”, which was a deep read with a contemporary twist on John Berger’s TV program and then book from which the course took its name. This was the best class I ever taught for so many reasons, including an experiment in giving no formal grades, lectures which included everything from Lana Del Rey to Rembrandt, a field trip to the NYPL Picture Collection, and more and more, but most of all, because the students were thoughtful, complicated, and really cared.
One of the last assignments I gave towards the end of the semester was to consider photography’s relationship to love, the students had to make a picture of someone they love, and ask someone they love to make one of them too. Knowing it would be my last semester at Stern, and feeling the familiar swelling of nostalgia which comes with preparing to say goodbye, I took portraits of the students during this assignment as my own gesture of love towards them and towards Stern. I’m sharing those pictures today.
