In the half-century of its existence SPE transformed itself from its original form as an unofficial, photo-specific splinter division of the College Art Association into something akin to photography’s equivalent of the Audubon Society: $20 plus an interest in birds gets you in — and they’ll waive the interest in birds. […]
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Somehow, despite the separate and combined successes of K-12 photo-education, visual literacy, and media literacy, the ability to attend closely and thoughtfully to photographic images, and to analyze and evaluate them critically, has yet to become a widespread skill among the populace at large. This does not bode well for the future. […] What gets scanted is “photography literacy,” the ability to understand, analyze, and have a critical relationship to still photographs of any kind, perhaps most importantly those one did not make oneself — the grounding necessary to “read” those images, valued as the visual equivalent of reading comprehension in relation to written texts not of one’s own devising. […] From my outsider’s perspective, the visual literacy movement has possibly missed an important boat by failing to recognize the relevance, significance, and longevity of the K-12 photo-education movement, and by not encouraging or even undertaking the creation of an annotated history thereof. […] We are the “illiterates of the future” Moholy warned us about; and our children will be the illiterates of an even more hopeless future unless we transcend our current fantasies about photography education and align them at last with the higher realities of our time and place. […] |
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