Trigger

REVISITING

Growing Pains: In the seventies, you were a teacher in New York’s South Bronx as well as an education adviser to New York City. In 1974, with the help of other educators and the support of the Polaroid Foundation, you put together Learn to See: A Sourcebook of Photography Projects by Students and Teachers. You must have felt that the publication and its approach haven’t lost their relevance, because in 2021 you reissued Learn to See (delpire & co, Paris) and put out a new book, Eyes Open: 23 Photography Projects for Curious Kids (Aperture, New York, and delpire & co, Paris). Why did you feel the need to revisit one book and create another, both within a year? And what were the differences in the approaches and visions of the two publishers who worked with you?

Susan Meiselas: It’s interesting that you put it in the framework of revisiting. I appreciate that because I think most people don’t. First of all, very few people know about the 1974 book or the fact that I taught in a primary school for the first four or five years of my career, at the same time I was actually producing Carnival Strippers, which may seem like a surprising double life. Learn to See really evolved from teaching and not knowing what to do with photography and kids. It was a very genuine instinct.

And then Julien Frydman at delpire & co saw it as an object and just said, ‘I love this. I still think it has a lot of value, and let’s just reproduce it exactly as is.’ He understood the book’s role in the history of photography. So the one original copy I had went to Paris, and they reproduced it really well. Of course, I didn’t have any of the original photographic materials, so a facsimile like this you could only do in a digital age. delpire & co took all those pages out from the spiral binding and rescanned them at high res to reproduce the book. They made a very small run of 500 copies, which is practically sold out. Meanwhile, Aperture had a different mindset: they’re looking to make new books. They don’t often republish, unless it’s their own old books – they’ve reprinted my book Nicaragua, for example.

And there’s a tangential but meaningful connection, which was that Denise Wolf, who leads education publications at Aperture, happened to have gone to the school where I taught in Rock Hill South Carolina many decades later. So she knew about Learn to See as a young person. For many years Denise said to me, ‘I wish I could reproduce Learn to See.’ And I kept saying, ‘Well, you know Polaroid film doesn’t even exist anymore. Why would we do that?’ And then as the internet developed, there was this question: Could you do something in a more interactive space via the internet to invite people to participate? After making the multimedia project Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1991–2007), which included akaKURDISTAN, as a website collecting photographs, videos, documents, and oral accounts by Kurdish citizens, I could not imagine the management of a new project. I simply said, ‘No way. I’m not doing another participatory website.’

She kept coming back to me, and eventually I said, ‘Well, maybe there’s a whole other idea of something we could do that would be a kind of revisiting, but more as a contemporary reading of our culture today.’ So Eyes Open is a response that begins with literally looking through Learn to See and considering which projects would be appropriate to engage in the process of visual literacy today. Then we invited kids to respond to those projects or add new ones. The drive was to animate and engage people again in the process to think about what they are photographing. What can they do today with cameras differently than we could do with Polaroids then?

GATHERING

Growing Pains: Eyes Open evolved over time through an outreach initiative that brought together people engaged in teaching photography in a classroom or an after-school program. Over 200 teachers from around the world gathered and shared the work of over 400 children. How was this process of gathering and selecting images happening, and how did it differ from the process of gathering materials for Learn to See?

Susan Meiselas: With Learn to See, I just got envelopes from people sent in the mail with little bits and pieces of things – puzzles to try to put together. I had a wonderful designer, William Field, who created a way of seeing all the 101 contributions equally, which I loved. We invented titles that would allow the materials to be visually diverse and then simply gave each a number and indexed the themes in the backmatter.

With Eyes Open, we sent out digital packets to over 200 teachers to see which projects in particular would be exciting for them to see, knowing that they didn’t have the whole book, and what might continue to be relevant. I wasn’t encouraging mimicking as much as giving them a framework to understand the way we had thought in the early seventies about visual education. I began to see certain concepts in their responses that I myself, as a young photographer, hadn’t really learned, which is something I often think about when I see contemporary photographers’ work. The work the kids were doing was clearly impacted by exposure from beyond the classroom, from what they had seen in exhibitions and books and online. So what I wanted to do was imagine this 360-degree world of today where kids are seeing work from many different kinds of sources. With the internet in particular, there’s almost confusion and a fusion as well. I wanted to come up with a concept for a book that could really encompass all in response to what I was learning from and with kids about how visual culture functions for them today.

MIXING

Growing Pains: Learn to See included images produced by children and teachers’ prompts. Eyes Open includes photographs by kids from around the world, mixing them with works by established artists (among them Zoe Leonard, Rinko Kawauchi, Sally Mann, Jim Goldberg, Lebohang Kganye, and Cindy Sherman) as well as selected quotes about their practices. In the first case, there was a multivocality of educators present, and in the second, a multivocality of makers: the uniformity of design gives the same platform to both beginning and mature artists. Could you please speak about these choices and differences?

Susan Meiselas: The design of Eyes Open is a format that’s not trying to distinguish the children from the artists. It’s really trying to say, ‘We are all evolving visual people.’ And I love that there’s a mix: sometimes it’s the work of emerging artists, sometimes they’re artists who are more well known, and they’re both interweaving with students who are being published for the first time.

We can talk about combining and selecting works through the example of ‘alphabetography’, which opens the book. There are many artists who have thought about the alphabet. I started with Wendy Ewald – she’s the only person in both books, and she’s been a teacher most of her life. I knew the Arab and American alphabet projects that she had done. I looked to include others – Lee Friedlander and Ed Ruscha being two of the many other possibilities. But I was limited by pages, and therefore each time I had to be very pragmatic with limited choices. In some cases, I was able to have more than one artist or student represented.

When I worked on Learn to See, I made all those decisions: I wanted each of those 101 projects. And in the case of Aperture, I was given a framework within which I had to work. Eyes Open had to be very accessible and fit into what Aperture sees itself doing. There were some constraints, essentially, on how many projects we could fit in to the page count.

BEYOND ‘ME’

Growing Pains: In the text published by Magnum about Eyes Open, you say, ‘The culture of the iPhone has generated a self-orientation versus an outward-looking, engaged process of observation.’ But selfies and self-oriented lenses are so much part of the daily routine for kids now. The book chooses the strategy of not, perhaps, reclaiming this genre or finding ways to build on this visual culture, but rather proposes stepping aside from it. Can you elaborate on this choice?

Susan Meiselas: I see that iPhones are often used almost like diaries. And the selfie culture is of course about ‘me’. There’s a lot of ‘me’, and then there’s ‘the other’. How does one bridge from ‘me’ to ‘the other’? Kids are particularly oriented toward ‘me and my friends’. Even much more so than their families. The Portraits in Place project is about ‘me’ in a chosen landscape. That’s trying to begin a progression beyond just ‘me’. I’m trying to find ways that kids can progress from ‘me’ to ‘me and the world’ – and then be more excited to look out at the world. The sequence is creating an evolution towards a way of thinking or experiencing the world. And yet, the book is not designed to only be followed page to page.

How can the kids become observers in the world, and look at their families and see distinct gestures, and not just ask for or always expect the performative? Of course, there is a natural performative instinct and invitation from a camera, but there’s a difference between inviting the presentational or performative and moving towards a more observational, reflective eye.

My bias is to shift them away from thinking that the selfie is the only thing they’re inspired to do. I feel the book would be a total failure if that was all that kids found themselves doing at the end of looking through it, and don’t want to experiment with different vantage points. I don’t want to tell them how to do photography, but I want to give them a pathway towards expanding their own vision. Not just from an evidential perspective, but also from an imaginary space that can be conceived. If a kid is oriented in one direction or the other, that’s fine – there’s a spectrum to inspire them to explore.

AGE

Growing Pains: Learn to See is aimed at all ages, from preschool kids and up to pre-college and elderly. Eyes Open is specifically addressed to children aged nine to twelve and older. How were these age categories defined? Were they proposed by publishers? Were they clear to you from the start of the process of working on these books? How did this age definition affect your making of the publications?

Susan Meiselas: Learn to See refers to different classrooms. So the class could have been an elementary school classroom, high school classroom, college classroom, whatever. The book has geometric symbols to indicate appropriate ages. That was my visual code to give teachers a guideline for what they thought their kids could achieve. For Eyes Open, that was a marketing issue for Aperture. As a publisher, they were very clear that when you send books to a bookstore, you have to position the book somewhere.

TEACHING

Growing Pains: That was also so 2021 – connecting via Zoom, and making such a meaningful experience out of teaching and this exchange. But let’s return to the seventies. What and how were you teaching then?

Susan Meiselas: I was tasked to be a visual consultant for the Community Resources Institute based in New York. I was teaching kids storytelling using animation with eight-millimetre film. I loved it even more than photography, because those were invented, fictional stories that kids created by cutting up construction paper. They would imagine a landscape, and then create characters and animate with stills as they moved their characters across the scenes they had hand drawn. Each student made a short film of their story.

Then I started to do photography as well in some schools. In a few of them, I built a darkroom. I started in one classroom (which had fourth, fifth, and sixth grades combined), and then the institute had me teach other classrooms as well as other teachers and even parents. A few years later, I went as an artist-in-residence in South Carolina and Mississippi to teach in several elementary schools.

I was using photography really to teach the most basic learning – between the alphabet with words, to sentences and then ideas. How do children learn to speak and to read? ‘Read what you see and say’ was a very important technique. You take a kid outside, they make a photograph, they come back into the classroom, and you say, ‘So what’s this picture of or about?’ It’s very easy for them to tell you. If you ask them to write about it, they don’t know where to begin. Actually, I’m not that different from them! If you asked me to write about all this, it would be a tortured session, versus finding a way to talk about it in response to your questions. It has a different flow. The kids would tell me, and I would listen. I would capture their words, and then they would write their stories from what I heard them say. Then they learned to read what they’d told me.

FROM WITHIN

Growing Pains: In the seventies, as you mentioned, there were not so many photobooks available to bring to a class. But in your more recent teaching experience, have you been sharing some printed matter examples with your students? Maybe to go beyond single images and talk about visual narrative?

Susan Meiselas: I know people do bring photobooks to their classes. And you both might remember when I was teaching you both in the master’s workshop at Leiden University. Bas Vroege and I had a somewhat different approach. I would much prefer a student stew and not know what to do. Bas would sometimes say, ‘Why don’t you do this?’ I feel like the only real work is the work you commit to, because you have your own curiosity and passion to pursue it. My inclination as a teacher at the highest level, or even at the lowest level, is not to bring in references but rather to ask questions, to create frameworks for kids or students’ own exploration or experimentation. That’s John Dewey’s learning by doing – a very fundamental concept. You can respond to what somebody else wants you to do, and you can do it very well. But if you’re going to have a life in the work of making, it has to come from within, in response to yourself or the world – but it comes from the doing.

But, of course, it depends. I was invited to teach in Abu Dhabi, maybe ten years ago, after I had published Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History. I worked with a group of young women who were segregated, gender-wise, in art college. They were inspired to do something in response to my book, which they had seen. They began to collect their family albums from the Emirates, which had not been done before. They definitely took certain ideas they saw in my book, but they adapted and elaborated on it. And their book was from that inspiration but unique to their experience.

We now live in such a different universe. I’m meeting students internationally, and I’m very aware that they don’t need physical objects as references. They just search and float on the internet, and they don’t necessarily know the source of the things they see. Maybe this surfing the internet is the doing before the making – maybe that’s their ‘doing’ process.