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Illuminate Something Invisible Daniel Goodwin Associate Professor of Studio Art and Teagle Project Faculty Liaison, University at Albany Edward Schwarzschild Associate Professor of English and Teagle Project Faculty Liaison, University at Albany
In spring 2018, our stand-alone semester-length seminar, “This Place: Writing and Photography,” used the exhibition This Place as a touchstone and a springboard to generate discussion and, even more importantly, to inspire new interdisciplinary creative work. By design, the seminar included a unique set of students: MFA and MA graduate students in Studio Art, MA and PhD graduate students in English/Creative Writing, and BA students in both Studio Art and English/ Creative Writing. Our goal was to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations throughout the semester. We paired writers and photographers, matching undergraduates with one another and PhD students with those in MA and MFA programs. We required them to produce work together. In order to give the students experience working together across disciplines, we assigned several
collaborative exercises. These exercises were designed to help students build up to the semester’s final project, a student-produced and -printed book-length publication called Some Places. One of those exercises, called “Illuminate Something Invisible,” was particularly successful, and has the potential to be a useful collaborative exercise in almost any interdisciplinary arts-related class. We adapted our exercise from a photography project created by Arthur Ou called “Photograph Something Invisible” from The Photographer’s Playbook (2014). In our collaborative project, each writer/photographer pair produced a folio of five photographs (each 11 x 14 inches) and a 2,500-word essay. Teams, in consultation, identified a subject that is invisible. They were permitted to define the term invisible as broadly
