(This is not an April Fool’s joke.)<\/p>\n
In the summer of 2014, when I started teaching The Interactive Vision<\/em>, my social media photography course, as an elective at Quinnipiac, a local professor published a research paper that appeared to contradict the lessons of my course and everything I knew about photography.<\/p>\n A cognitive psychologist at Fairfield University, Linda A. Henkel, spoke on NPR about her investigations of smartphone cameras. Her study sent her students to Yale\u2019s newly renovated art museum and had them snap pictures of the works of some artists with their phones and simply look at the pictures of other artists with their naked eyes.<\/p>\n The students recalled the details of what they observed with their eyes alone much better than what they photographed. This appeared to suggest that taking pictures with a smartphone was replacing our ability to remember. Henkel, in the interview, even referred to the phones as \u201cexternal memory aids<\/a>\u201d diminishing our \u201cmental cognitive processing.\u201d<\/p>\n At the same time, I had photography theory on my mind as intensely as I did during my still photography classes at NYU. I had reopened Susan Sontag and Alfred Steiglitz, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Bresson, and my notebooks and negative contact sheets from twenty years before.<\/p>\n The Interactive Vision<\/em> had a similar goal to the first course I designed, The Interactive Voice<\/em>. I concentrated on how interactivity had change word use and word forms. Now I wanted to do the same thing with imagery and photography.<\/p>\n I wanted to study how my students use digital cameras, how I use cameras as someone who learned on an entirely manual, 20th century, 35mm film SLR camera, identify the lessons that were still relevant and necessary from either process, and identify (or create) the exercises that would develop and maintain those skill sets now.<\/p>\n My thesis was also the same as the first course\u2014that interactive photography was a more evolved and dynamic version of the original process as long as students used the original process to build their sense of sight.<\/p>\n Henkel\u2019s 2014 study said we use cameras to avoid seeing. I maintained that photographers use cameras not just to enhance their cognition around sight, but to develop ways of seeing that most people never achieve.<\/p>\n People go to photo galleries and movies to learn how to see from the photography masters, but the masters will always tell apprentices, \u201cI\u2019m no master.\u201d Professionals may have some natural talent, \u201ca good eye,\u201d but the camera and the process and the will to take many, many photographs taught them most of what they know.<\/p>\n Bestselling authors say the same thing. Talent doesn\u2019t mean nearly as much as perseverance and practice.<\/p>\n Henkel\u2019s study was called \u201cPoint and Shoot Memories,\u201d and there has always been a difference between people who take photographs to study light and people who take point and shoot pictures to \u201csay cheese.\u201d The difference is in the photographer, not the tool.<\/p>\n I use my smartphone to snap a poster to remember a date or to snap a map or menu instead of memorizing it, but I also use my smartphone daily to see the world around me in a deeper way\u2014to remember it better\u2014because of my training.<\/p>\n Since Henkel\u2019s study, even worse clickbait headlines have maligned smart devices for weakening our ability to appreciate beauty<\/a> or remain present for an event at all<\/a>. These articles play into our fears about new technology and make our desire to rip smartphones from everyone\u2019s hands and throw them away seem correct.<\/p>\n The only correct thing to do is teach students how to use smartphone cameras well. The only lesson to learn here is we need better photography lessons in grammar schools.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (This is not an April Fool’s joke.) In the summer of 2014, when I started teaching The Interactive Vision, my social media photography course, as…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3972,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,47,58,56],"tags":[194,166,80,117,55,163,193,92],"class_list":["post-3887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-course","category-gameweek","category-ivision","category-ivoice","tag-camera","tag-consciousness","tag-gamification","tag-image","tag-interactivity","tag-metacourse","tag-research","tag-thesis","post_format-post-format-image"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3887"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4111,"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3887\/revisions\/4111"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}