A Meaningful Life:
Three French Students and Their Teacher Explore
How to Make a Difference Via Photograph
by Jennifer Huxta

see also:
Student Photographs
Excerpts from Jennifer Huxta's Journal

I "met" Dan Eldon at the Photographer's Gallery in London. I wandered into the bookstore and found The Journey Is the Destination immediately, as if by radar. Rooted to the spot, I was transformed as I stood leafing through the colourful, dynamic pages depicting Eldon's brilliant life in Africa and his travelling adventures. Although I had never visited many of the places he loved, the book felt familiar. I recognized his need to document his life in photographs and journals, pasting it together, making it up as he went along.

As an English teacher in Parisian high schools, I now use extracts from Dan's journal to inspire various projects which involve the topics he explored: art, photography, war, humanitarian aid, and travel. This year at Lycée Massillon, I taught 12th graders in the special section: English As A Native Language. I had three students, Maral Kerovpyan, Jean Kohler, and Léa Nelson, each of whom have an Anglophone parent. We began the course with the reading of Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels, a novel about the Holocaust that explores the psychology of the survivors. We asked the following questions: What can one do in one's life that's important? How can small daily actions change something in the world?

Michaels gives the following example: people who looked the other way during the Holocaust when they saw an escaping refugee remained humane. "And those who gave water or bread?" she writes, " They were raised up to the realm of angels!" To save a life simply by looking away. Not to report the escaping person. It seems so small. But the book provides other examples of how significant a small subversive act can be-sometimes a matter of life and death. The students applied this idea to their own lives and quickly realized that what they do in their daily lives IS important, and may have the power to change history.

Expanding this idea, I presented Dan Eldon's work in The Journey Is the Destination, and we began our study of photography. I set up a darkroom and showed them how to develop film and print photographs, encouraging them to explore the world around them. We wandered in the city with our cameras, practicing with the focus, f-stop and shutter speed controls, then developing the results in the dark room. Jean and Léa showed an immediate interest in surrealism, using crazy angles and wild shapes, or manipulating the images by scratching the negative.

The students applied this idea to their own lives and quickly realized that what they do in their daily lives IS important, and may have the power to change history.

To familiarize students with the printing chemicals, one basic dark room exercise I've found to be effective is the photogram. Often used by Man Ray, the photogram is essentially a shadow-collage. Students choose wild or ordinary objects and arrange them on photographic paper in the enlarger. The paper is exposed to light and processed, revealing the outlines of the objects that block the light. This exercise is also perfect to explain the basic idea of printing: paper darkens when exposed to light, and areas which haven't been exposed remain white.

Meanwhile, we studied the work of international war photojournalists featured in the documentary, Dying to Tell the Story. As an introduction to the film, I presented supplementary materials such as essays and articles written by or about the journalists. We read Christiane Amanpour's Murrow Award acceptance speech. It was a fascinating introduction to the ongoing dialogue surrounding photojournalism because she brought up such issues as subjectivity vs. objectivity, sensationalism, a journalist's responsibility, and simply, what makes good journalism. I asked the students to respond to a series of questions that highlighted these issues and stressed the power and responsibility of both networks and journalists.

For example, reflecting on her experience in Somalia, Amanpour mentioned that one image was replayed hypnotically and diffused all over the world, that of a US soldier being killed and dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. She explains that the mass diffusion of this image had a tremendous impact on US foreign policy and caused the US to pull out of Somalia. Afterwards, the US government was even more hesitant to get involved in Bosnia despite the alarming news reports of genocide. Examining this speech, the students understood how the power of the press "can undermine leadership".

I found that when we were studying the destruction caused by war, we became overwhelmed by questions of how and why it happens. Therefore, it was important that we were making a tangible thing-a photograph. The idea was to present tough subject matter to the students, but at the same time give them a skill, a way to respond to the subject matter and to do something about it.

For another project, we looked at examples of David Guttenfelder's current work in Israel, published in the International Herald Tribune and other papers. I asked them to bring in some other photographs from current conflicts. We looked at them together and I asked them each to choose one and to write a short paragraph reacting to it and answering the following questions: What story does the photo tell? Why is it effective? Can you tell how close the photographer was to the action? How would you react if you were the photographer in this situation? Then I asked them to bring in their favorite art supplies, found objects, scraps they had collected, and I brought in additional supplies. I asked them to re-tell the story in their photograph, to guess what could've happened before and after the decisive moment when it was taken, and to depict it all in a collage. We spent the rest of the session and the next absorbed in collages, which the students then shared and discussed.

Finally, I asked them what they think it takes to be a good war photographer. This activity places them in the moment of the photograph, and, by asking the student to imagine him/herself as the photographer, it seeks to get beyond our desensitization regarding devastating images. Also, the fact that these events are happening presently, not in a distant past, gives the activity more impact.

We looked at some groups of photographs in The Journey Is the Destination, such as those for Deziree Safaris and the ones from Dan's trip to South Africa. I asked the students to create a photo essay, a series of photographs with a message or purpose. We brainstormed ideas. I told them they could "play the journalist" and investigate something or simply show us something about their lives. They set about shooting, developing, printing the photographs and displaying them. They all chose to represent something important and close to them about which they wrote a few words explaining the photographs.

Although we did specific projects together, I also made sure to allow a lot of time for the students to experiment in the darkroom and explore with their cameras, following their whims and ideas. I always came prepared with something to do, and equally prepared to set it aside in order to persue one of their ideas. In this way, I tried to let their interests determine the path the class would take, a path which was often exciting and unpredictable! I saw myself more as a guide than a teacher, a sounding-board for their ideas, someone to help them refine and refocus their projects. Overall, I tried to impress upon them the importance of their daily actions.