Lessons from Photographic Spaces

Since I moved to Motupōhue/Bluff in 2021 I have rekindled a lifelong interest in photography.  The amazing views right outside my front door, where Foveaux Strait enters Bluff Harbour, had me posting endless photos from my phone to social media.  Soon, the phone was no longer enough. Now, I’m on to my third camera, all the gear that goes with them, dozens of online master classes, and as many one-on-one photography workshops, tutorials, and tours as I can sign up for.

As my photography knowledge has developed over the last three years, I have drawn many parallels with my teaching and leadership consultancy and background. I’ve often thought, “There is a blog in there somewhere,” but haven’t got around to writing one—until an experience over the weekend brought the similarities, to steal a photography term, sharply into focus!

I went to a photography conference—my first ever foray into a new field and a new group of people, many of whom are expert and amazing professional photographers. The national convention, as it was called, was going to be another big step in my journey, and the opportunity to learn from experienced masters of the art.

Now, I have been to hundreds of education conferences, regional, national, and international. I have been a keynote speaker at many of them, and I have even run conferences myself, so I know how they work. I was excited and looking forward to doing something new and to being able to blend into the background where no one had any expectations of me to deliver anything, and where I hoped I would learn lots. I knew no one, no one knew me, but there is blending, and then there is disappearing, and I was completely invisible at this conference.

“Stand up if this is the first time you have been to this convention,” the president of the association said in his opening speech. I stood, along with several others. “Take a look” he encouraged those who remained seated, “and make sure you make everyone who is standing feel welcome.”

“Great,” I thought. That sounded promising. Unfortunately, it was a promise unfulfilled as, over the next two days not one person spoke to me, or even smiled at me, in spite of my efforts to make eye contact and connect. Well, to be honest, one person did exchange a few sentences out in the foyer before the event opened, but that was it.

I listened to great keynotes, I did circuits of the trade exhibits and purchased something, I viewed the amazing exhibition of award-winning photos on display on the venue walls—many times—and I squeezed into the morning tea and lunch space and stood alone. Obviously, most people knew others and they had come in groups from camera clubs and photography associations across the country. In the roll call of clubs, no one from my local club stood. Although I have joined it recently, I have not yet been able to attend a meeting, so I couldn’t have identified anyone even if they were there. Would that have made a difference? I’m not sure.

By the afternoon of the second day, I was feeling so awkward and uncomfortable about standing around like a spare part, I decided it was time to take myself away from the stress. I flagged the two afternoon workshop sessions I had been looking forward to and went back to my hotel to reflect.

My first thought was, it must be me. I should have been pushier, inserted myself into some groups and stopped hiding in the background. Maybe, I was the awkward one and, as a newbie, I might not have had much to talk about. Strange then, in the taxi ride to the airport the next morning, when I found that the driver was a photographer, we happily chatted about camera types, composition, locations, and manual camera settings for the full half-hour trip. Why didn’t that happen at the conference?

Learning from the silences

I did learn from the speakers, and from the photos on display, but I learned even more from the silences. From my education and research background, I recognise that my alien and alienating experience at the photography convention is exactly the daily experience of Māori learners in our schools’ white spaces. Just as I did, Māori youth blame themselves first, we do little to allay that feeling, and it sticks. Like me, they too choose to disconnect and disengage, we blame them for that, and then they blame themselves.

Not for one second, do I think that the photography delegates intended to isolate me. I am certain they would be horrified to know how I felt. Some might even change things for their next conference, but it would be unlikely to last. The wider, more powerful space would prevail, and another newcomer would experience the same as I did. That’s what happens with many of the checklist, tweaked, surface changes we make in education that never address the power of the monocultural view we cast over every aspect of our lives.

Was it a white space? Well, there may well have been Māori delegates, but I couldn’t identify any and, apart from one speaker who was invited to photograph Tuhoe, and one single photo of a Māori girl in a korowai, I saw no Māori subjects or content. There was no pōwhiri, so yes, apart from native birds and some landscapes this could have been a photography conference in Timbuktu. Yet, with my own whānau members heavily engaged in Māori media, I know the wealth of Māori images, appropriately captured by Māori photographers and videographers, that are out there. I wonder if this convention audience is aware of their existence, or would invite any of those experts to speak to their membership?

Learning from photography

Focus

Photography is all about focus. Initially, you try to get every aspect of your photo sharp, until you learn that focus is a choice, and an art in itself. You shun the ‘auto’ setting on your camera and dive into manual settings where your subtle changes can intentionally blur movement or backgrounds, and where you can stack, then blend, several photos to make sure the focus is exactly where you want it to be. Who knew?

Teaching is also about focus. Our whānau has a saying, “What you focus on becomes your reality.” Your relentless focus on the behaviour of a few children soon expands to become a negative view of your whole class. Our focus on white systems and definitions of success and achievement make it the hegemonic holy grail—the one-size-fits-all endpoint. Photography teaches us that if you shift the settings, you can get a completely different picture! Mmmm, I wonder how THAT applies to our classrooms.

Light

Photography is about chasing and finding the light. A keynote speaker showed us a photo of a black swan resting on a dark lake with a beautiful beam of light coming across the water. Sunrise? A moonbeam? No, the light from a rubbish truck out early in the morning on the other side of the lake. So, your sources of light are often unexpected and not what you think they are. How often, in our classrooms, do our children never get to shine their light? In a recent keynote at a national literacy conference, I showed the te reo Māori storytelling abilities of my great-granddaughter to ask teachers how would that light be visible in their literacy-focused/obsessed, English language classrooms and schools. Our Māori learners often leave their light at the classroom door because it’s a brilliance the teacher or the school doesn’t value or understand.

Language

Photography has a language all of its own! Having delved into my camera’s settings and thinking I had mastered maybe 30% of those terms, reading up pre-conference to the world of photographic exhibitions, awards, and competitions introduced me to another world, the world of photography-letters-after-your-name. My own ‘alphabet soup’ of an MNZM, a PhD and a MEdAdmin with Honours all pale in comparison!

Here was another ladder to climb through competition to letters like FPSNZ, EFIAP, and MFIAP. (Look those up for yourselves!). There are Honours, Licentiates, Associates, and Fellows (I always have problems with that word!) that have taken photographers years and lifetimes to achieve. A Salon is not where you go to get your hair or nails done but is a photographic exhibition or competition. What about dodging or burning —some allowed, some not—in competition image processing? The step that starts you on this process is a three-tiered grading system at club level that ranks you as a photographer, starting out at Grade C. To move ahead your competition entries are awarded Not Accepted: 0 points, Accepted: 1 point, Merit: 2 points, or Honours: 3 points. Accumulate enough points and you move up to the next grade.

Acceptance

The same process happens in our classrooms, unfortunately, where, in spite of the burning (that’s darkening) of our national school population, we employ dodging (that’s lightening), or should it be dodgy, processes to ensure our spaces retain their whiteness and Māori learners either remain not accepted forever, or be accepted, just, if they play by our rules. There is no merit or honour that can compensate for the compromise of fitting into the assimilated white space at the cost of your identity.

Of course, all assessments open up questions about who makes the rules, who decides, and whose knowledge counts. In photography, rules of composition can be overridden, we heard, by the narrative, the story your image is portraying. But what if you don’t understand the story?

In our processes to sift, sort, and label people according to our own experiences, who are we leaving out and what don’t we know? I saw that very screening process recently completely ignore the Māori attributes that Māori children were bringing to the tasks with the result that some of them were ‘not accepted’ into the programme.

Planning

After 40+ years of teaching, I would still never enter a classroom to take any sort of lesson without detailed, meticulous planning, in spite of many young teachers over the years trying to persuade me that they could ‘wing it.’

So it is with photography, where you see the stunning end result, but you don’t see the planning that has gone into that one successful shot. The photographer has researched the setting, the best times for the light, the position they need to stand, the behaviour of their moving subjects, or the perfect composition of that landscape. They have studied their camera settings, assessed the distance, decided what they want to focus on, and chosen the perfect lens. There are so many lessons for teaching in that process.

The Lens

The lens you view your students and your teaching practice through is a choice that exposes your own bias and background and opens up the often uncomfortable idea that there are other perspectives just as important as yours. What do you really know about your learners, their backgrounds, or their light? Knowing about that planning is changing my photography. Knowing that process in the classroom changes the experience of the learners who are not from the same background as yourself and makes you a better teacher.

I came home disappointed in myself that I didn’t stick it out and take advantage of all of the learning on offer, but I was also disappointed in the convention itself. In the classroom, it is not the job of Māori learners to fix racism or undo colonisation in education. In photography, it is not the job of new members to fix the inherent ‘closed shop’ mindset I encountered at a convention where the association’s by-line is Helping Photographers Grow.

I’m going to continue to seek out the landscape that suits me best for my photography journey. It might not be conventions.

‘Standing around like a spare part’