Reassessing the Educational Value of Photography

The value and meaning of photography as an activity has changed in recent years.

This has been largely due to the Digital Revolution, a term that will just as clearly define the present historical period as the term Industrial Revolution defined the 19th Century.

Until comparatively recently, photography was a very specific activity that used standardised materials and equipment in a manner that was tightly controlled by the technical limitations of those materials.

As a photographer, your role in making photographs was generally limited to operating a camera with a greater or lesser degree of proficiency. The outcome being a folder of finished prints provided for you by technicians.

The prints could be saved and stored, displayed or reproduced, but they generally had no other function than to be a record or memento of specific people, places or events.

Any other outcome for the image was also the province of technicians, using specialised equipment and materials beyond the means of most photographers.

It was unthinkable that personal (as opposed to commercial) photographs would be displayed, published or broadcast to an audience outside a personal network of contacts.

In saying this, I seem to be describing still images. My remarks apply equally to the even more dramatic changes in the field of moving images with the move away from cine film to the endlessly rewritable medium of digital video.

Photography is now much more than an Arts and Crafts/Design activity or the medium by which we are informed or entertained by old school media.

What do these changes to the way we use photographic images mean for society and education?

Anyone who carries a mobile phone is potentially able to instantly publish images or video at any time of the night or day.

Given this, it's surely not fanciful to suggest that photography has changed in that it has become a commonplace medium of public discourse, akin to the spoken or written word.

It has become an intrinsic part of the way we converse or express ourselves, and given its broadcastability, beyond the confines of face to face interaction.

As educators, we need to recognise and accommodate this changing role of photography. It can no longer be thought of as merely another craft specialism within the confines of art and design.

It demands to be seen as a fully academic subject that encompasses the study of it in terms of its role as both a language form and as a technology that is radically modifying the forms of public discourse.