Go ahead, I’m not an authority on teaching photography. In fact, photography is not my job. However, in the almost 3 years of life of the Photographers Blog, I have felt very closely the frustration of many fans who have started to study photography but have ended up desperate and frustrated.
Today it is a small review (constructive, I promise) addressed to all these teachers of photography schools. The following letter summarizes the wails and frustrations that come to me every day from my readers, photography buffs who leave the class less and less. I hope this cry reaches the proper ears.
Dear professor of photography school
There’s no doubt that you’re in control of photography, seriously, no one doubts it. So you don’t need to impress your students with complicated technical details from day one. By exposing terminology developed in most cases, you get the opposite effect, that of scaring and intimidating your students. And your mission is not that, but quite the opposite. You don’t need to deploy all this overwhelming technical arsenal from the first session, leave your first session ALWAYS without mentioning any technical details, really, later you will have the opportunity to delve into the technical details as much as necessary, but not at the beginning. The first day of a photography enthusiast in one of these courses is a fateful and crucial moment. Depending on how you feel about your students, you will provoke in them love and passion for photography, or confusion, hatred and rejection Everything is in this first class.
Your mission is not to teach photography. Your mission is TOMBER IN LOVE from the amateur of photography, to provoke this spark, you are a little Cupid of photography, a provocateur of ‘passion’, this passion is the fuel that the student will use from this moment to learn photography, Get over these technicalities and difficulties, and continue to resist. Opening and firing speed? What a difference it makes!
Think about it for a moment: wouldn’t you want your students to associate you with a pleasant memory and hold you accountable for their passion and love for photography? The typical teacher / teacher you remember your whole life, isn’t your hair clinging to the possibility that people have given up photography, forever, out of fear, confusion, frustration, because of you?
Every time one of your students stops going to class and leaves class in the middle, witness a “photographic suicide” probably caused by you. When you make one of your students believe that he is disabled, that he doesn’t know much, that he’s not smart enough to grasp all concepts, even if you do it subconsciously, he condemns him to a photographic failure for life. No, the fact that the student does not try is not a valid excuse. Your student doesn’t need to get tired. It is his trade that learns effortlessly. Not only do you have to master photography, it’s only 50%. The other 50% is called pedagogy. That is to say know how to transmit, know how to communicate, deceive, enchant, love, dose, enchant.
This is called teaching
mario