The Photograph and the English Teacher

The second graphic medium that English teachers have a great stake in is the photograph. There are two things we can do to accelerate the acceptance of this form at an artistic level in America. First is to make the classroom a clearing house for intelligent comment on the medium: the Saturday Review folios on "Photography as a Fine Art" which have become catalogs for their two annual exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the groundbreaking activity of the Museum of Modern Art, especially Edward Steichen's The Family of Man, an ideal classroom text available from Pocketbooks; as well as the growing library of first-rate books on the history and criticism of photography.

The great picture magazines are not only interesting in their week to week work, but distinguished series are gathered into enduring volumes not only valuable for their subject matter contents but also illustrative of first-rate photojournalism. The Life series on the West, on America's arts and skills, on the history of Western man, religion, as well as the monumental World Library. And if we keep a sharp eye out, we can catch windfalls like Time's color folio, "Shakespeare: Midsummer Night's Box Office," which will reward us for years with better instructional materials. Look, Horizon, American Heritage, and the photography magazine annuals are other sources of work that often deserves the close attention characterized by good criticism and teaching.

It would help if we stocked the general school library with a few examples of the expensive if eloquent new books which exploit fully the special characteristic of photography as an expressive medium. One especially fine example is Ansel Adams' and Nancy Newhall's This Is the American Earth (Knopf, 1960, $15), a labor of love attempting to show Americans how gravely they have abused the goodly continent entrusted to them. The director of the Sierra Club (founded in 1892 by John Muir to study and protect nature in America) writes in the foreword to this eloquent collocation of Ansel Adams' (and others') photography and Nancy Newhall's poetic prose: "Although Thomas Jefferson argued that no one generation has a right to encroach upon another generation's freedom, the future's right to know the freedom of wilderness is going fast. And it need not go at all.

A tragic loss could be prevented if only there could be broader understanding of this: that the resources of the earth do not exist just to be spent for the comfort, pleasure, or convenience of the generation or two who first learn how to spend them; that some of the resources exist for saving, and what diminished them diminished all mankind. .. ."

This ethic of conservation stands out with great power from pictures of eroded land, macadamized urban jungles, burnt-over forests, bulldozer level uniformity, as well as images of hope-green shoots against the charred trunk of a great tree, jewels of dew on grass, the miracle of a bird in flight. A book using the new eloquence of the photoessay to indict us in our careless stewardship is particularly apt for it presents a paradigm of the kind of reverence for nature and the possibilities of greater life that the humanities have a major responsibility to instill.

The second method for accelerating a mature and widely based appreciation of photography as a fine art in America is to encourage use of the medium by the student himself. Visual essays, term papers illustrated by appropriate pictures, even blackboard "exhibitions" are naturals for the English classroom. (A high school student's photoessay on prejudice, hung about the bars of a jungle gym, was the sensation of the splendid photo exhibition at the Oregon Centennial in 1959; so many Oregonians were impressed by this photomontage of their land that the state now supports the activity each year.) Superior photographers should be encouraged, just as writers are, to enter the annual Scholastic-Ansco picture contest. And interested English and art teachers should see if they can get the local newspapers to sponsor esthetically oriented photo shows.

They might also get their local TV stations to use classic photos for station breaks. The whole strategy is to get as many people as possible actively responding to the cultural potential in these new art forms. The hobby photography groups will have some enthusiasts to talk about how to use the cameras for expressive purposes. The photography magazines deserve a place in the classroom for the perspective they give. Photography would seem to have the greatest unexploited possibilities in the English curriculum both because excellent models are cheaply come by and because it is almost as cheap for individuals to "take up" the art themselves.