Building Student Independence in Photography (British Columbia, Canada)

By week four of a senior photography unit you can tell which students are making work and which are waiting for you. The waiting ones are not lazy. They were taught to produce a photograph by following a demonstration, and nobody taught them what to do when there is no demonstration. In a BC senior art classroom, where the Curricular Competencies expect students to create, refine and reflect on their own terms, that gap has to be closed on purpose.

Independence is a schedule, not a personality

A student is not independent or dependent in general. They are dependent at one point, and it is nearly always the same one: between having a brief and having a first idea. So the scaffold to fade first is the one you are most tempted to keep, the exemplar you show at the start. Plan the fade before the unit begins and tell students it is happening. Withdrawn on a published schedule, a scaffold reads as progression. Withdrawn when you get busy, it reads as abandonment.

A four-stage fade across one unit

1. Stage one: full model, tight brief. You supply the artist reference, the constraint and the shot list. Students execute. The learning purpose is technical, and the only decisions they make are within the frame.
2. Stage two: model, open brief. Same artist reference, but the shot list is replaced by a question the images must answer. Students now choose subject and location, and you find out who was following the list rather than the idea.
3. Stage three: reference bank, self-set constraint. Students choose from six practitioners and write their own constraint in one sentence before shooting. You approve the sentence, not the plan, which takes ninety seconds a student and holds the whole class.
4. Stage four: nothing but the deadline and the critique criteria. Students bring a body of work and defend the choices. If the first three stages ran properly, most of the room arrives with something.

Stage three lives or dies on how many working models a student has seen. A practitioner whose rules are visible on the surface of the image is the most useful teaching object here, which is why Bernd and Hilla Becher – Typologies of Photography is worth having in the bank: the typology is a constraint students can see, name and adapt into one of their own without you explaining what a constraint is.

Give them a critique protocol they can run without you

The other dependency is feedback. If every judgment about quality comes from you, students cannot work alone, because they cannot tell whether what they made is any good. Teach a three-move protocol and run it in pairs from week two. Describe only: what is in the frame, where is the light, what is sharp. Name the decision: what did the photographer choose that they could have done otherwise. Then one question: what would you need to see to know if it worked.

Practice it on published work first; it is easier to be honest about a stranger. Staged, constructed images give beginners something obvious to describe and something arguable to question, and Cindy Sherman – Staged Photography and Identity supplies exactly that kind of image with the analytical questions already framed, so pairs can run the protocol on a full set before turning it on each other.

What to do about the student who still will not start

There is always one, and the standard advice to give them more freedom makes it worse. Freedom is the thing they cannot use. Give them a smaller box: one location, one hour, thirty frames, one subject seen thirty ways. The constraint removes the paralysis, and the volume produces something to talk about in the next critique, which is what restarts them.

Scale and repetition are legitimate strategies, not a fallback, and large-format work built from accumulation makes that case visually, so Andreas Gursky – Digital Large-Format Photography is a useful thing to put in front of that student along with the smaller brief. Keep the reflection short. One sentence a week on what they would change feeds the Personal Awareness and Responsibility Core Competency without becoming another thing they avoid.

What the room looks like when the fade has worked

In the last two weeks you should be doing almost nothing visible. Students are shooting in three locations, someone has abandoned an idea on their own judgment rather than yours, and the questions coming to you are technical rather than permission-seeking. When a student stops asking "is this okay" and starts asking "how do I get this shadow", the scaffolds have come out cleanly and the work from here belongs to them.

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