Switching Hats

The Critical Response hat isn’t the only hat I wear. And sometimes when I’m wearing one of those other hats, I can’t get into the Critical Response hat quite as fast as I’d like to.

Case in point: this past Sunday I was at the photography education center where I’m active, Photoworks Glen Echo. I was leading the workshop that I teach once or twice a year, focused on the craft of combining words and pictures. I guess you could say I was wearing my teaching hat as opposed to my facilitating hat, my aesthetics hat as opposed to my critique hat, my Photoworks hat as opposed to my Dance Exchange hat. Not that any of those terms are mutually exclusive, but -- contrary to popular rumor -- my head is only just so big.

There comes a point in most photography classes when a student will spread prints out on the table, or post them on a board for viewing. People who frequent photo workshops are conditioned to treat this as critique time. And once it’s critique time, if the teacher doesn’t firmly establish a format from the outset, the conversation can pretty much slide anywhere. Which is what happened when one of the workshop participants laid out a series of portraits for a book she is planning.

Now, it wasn’t a disaster by any means. The artist was accomplished, so there was plenty of admiration for both the technical quality and the substance of her work. She had already stated her challenges and options for adding words to the images during the workshop’s opening round of introductions. But as soon as she put down a page of text next to one of the photos to show us how a spread in her book might appear, the fix-its started flying. “Make the text shorter.” “Use this sentence here, this is the essence.” “Put the interviews in the back of the book.” “You could try making some of the text larger, like a call-out in a magazine.” (Full disclosure: some of those fix-its came from me, since by that point jumping into the melee seemed the best way to offer my guidance.)

Lots of stuff starts going on in my own head in a moment like this. As a teacher, I wonder if I’m losing authority or if my opinion counts less because other people in the room have strong directives to offer. I’m trying to check the emotional temperature of the artist whose work is on the table – is she taking this in or is she shutting down? I’m weighing the merits of such fix-its against the value of good questions or less directive statements, multiple options against the one-problem, one-solution model. Lastly, I’m looking at the clock, since we’re already behind on the schedule for the afternoon.

The Critical Response Process, of course, offers help in all of those challenges, except perhaps the time constraint. And time is probably the reason why I didn’t step back, put on the CRP hat and try to redirect the interaction.

I always say that I consider an event a success if I know how I’ll do it better next time. So next time, while not necessarily engaging in a full-blown Critical Response session, I’ll probably do the following:

--Get the artist to talk about her challenges when she shows her work as opposed to much earlier in the workshop.
--Mindfully mention as the prints are placed on the table that this marks a transition where we’re likely to move into critique mode, and set some guidelines
--Encourage people to take a step back from the fixit: Can they frame the principle behind the suggestion they want to make rather than telling the artist what to do differently? Then I'd try to follow that principle myself.

As Liz often says, our impulse to fix another artist’s work can be a highly creative one. Channeling that impulse for the benefit of both people in the dialogue is the challenge. More on that topic soon, I hope.

It’s 5:30 in the evening, so please excuse me while I change into my Halloween hat.