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 or as specifically as they liked. We asked them to consider the myriad ways in which a subject might be thought of as invisible (optically, physically, socially, politically, etc.). After each team made their choice, they had to decide how they would “shed light” on their subject and make it visible to their audience. We shared Ou’s original prompt with our students, including these lines: “Related to invisibility are ideas of disappearance (think about time), hidden forces (think about wind), and degradation (think about rotting fruit).” 1

Our students produced phenomenally interesting work in response to this exercise. The example offered here comes from a collaboration between an MA student in photography and a writer who was an MA student in English as well as a working journalist. Together, they decided to explore the issue of the slow, widespread disappearance of bees in upstate New York.

The journalist decided to make their topic visible by conducting substantial, well-researched interviews with several local beekeepers, including one 69-year-old man whose voice concludes the piece by warning:

“You can’t turn your back on the bees or you’re going to lose them.”

The photographer was strongly influenced by Stephen Shore (one of the photographers in This Place), and he aspires to work in the same tradition. This student photographer has developed the habit of carrying around a 4-by-5- inch view camera. He would convince people to let him make portraits and/or capture urban landscapes. He chose not to simply illustrate the work of his journalist classmate. Instead, he tried to internalize the content and emotion of his partner’s written piece. He then set out to photograph something that would mark our complicity in the current plight of the bees. He wound up producing an eerie, surprisingly moving, depopulated urban landscape.

It is also interesting to note another indication of the exercise’s success: while in many cases the writers stuck with writing and the photographers stuck with photography, there were also cases in which partners elected to switch roles. Writers decided they wanted to try photography and photographers wanted to write. These experiences made the semester-long collaborations even stronger and seem to have had a lasting impact on the artistic practices of both the writers and the photographers.

Finally, we should note another important sign of the success of both the exercise and the seminar as a whole: because of the excellent response to the seminar and because of the strength of the work our students produced, we are team-teaching another exhibition-based seminar, and we hope to encourage others to do so as well. This could become a significant step toward making museum-based teaching a permanent part of our university’s curriculum.

1 Arthur Ou, “Photograph Something Invisible,” in Jason Fulford and Gregory Halpern, eds., The Photographer’s Playbook: 307 Assignments and Ideas (New York: Aperture, 2014), 259.