Homework #6 (4.) Lesson Plan: Old and New

Lesson Plan, Old and New: Video and Sculpture

Objective: Through the creation of a mixed media sculpture and experimentation with a digital video camera and editing, students learn to experiment with video manipulation and taking their sculptures one step further with digital media.

1. Mixed media sculpture. Using found and recycled objects, students will create a structure exploring view points - may be related to a house, or model (?). Exploring the materials and how they can create "spaces" that we will later explore with the camera.

2. Exploration: Change the Photo. Exploring the upclose - what happens when we zoom in? Crop things out? Using found images, students will experiment in their sketchbooks with different ways of cropping, rotating, and transforming (analog) with scissors. Students should reflect verbally or written about how the image and its meaning changed.

3. Video: Initial shooting. Students pair up and explore their sculpture with video - can incorporate moving objects but should focus on exploring how the sculpture changes from different perspectives, view points, and angles using the video camera.

4. Editing: Manipulation via iMovie. Students take footage from the sculpture and learn to manipulate and edit in iMovie, creating a new way of looking and interpreting their sculpture, perhaps structuring a narrative or else pairing the video with music to create an entirely new work.

Homework #6 (2.) Photo-Narrative

all images found on google image search.

Homework #6 (3.) Photography and Children

left: self-portrait no. 3, digital print, 2006

right: Cindy Sherman, Untitled #282, chromogenic print, 1993 (Carnegie Museum of Art)

One of my first assignments was to copy an artist's work in my undergraduate program - so I copied Cindy Sherman. It was my first time experimenting with photography. Although later on I began to use film, my first experimentations in photo were all digital. Though I think understanding manual/analog photography is very important, for children I believe digital can also be a great entry way to using photography as a medium.

Possible connections to students:

1. Self-portraiture and fantasy. Cindy Sherman's works can be used a reference here. Also my old professor, Elizabeth Raymer-Griffin, and, well, many more. Identity development is a major component of adolescence, and the idea of self-portrait and playing with both costume and deformity, restraint, and body expression are things students could really make their own through a series of lessons and practices. Digital or film, the main objectives would be to explore what a portrait is and how we can either play to it or disorient it. For example, in the Cindy Sherman photograph above, she is playing with the idea of direct gaze, as well as the mythical Medusa. Students might look at traditional paintings as reference, as well as other portrait photographers, both commercial and fine art (maybe they are both!)

Other artists: 

Carrie Mae Weems, The Louisiana Project

Nikki S. Lee

2. Documentary. Using photography to document their friends, family, and everyday lives. While we do use photography as a documentary format all the time now with our iPhones and digital cameras, it's often that we take many instead of just one - in the classroom, part of this would be learning to examine narrative through the use of only several pictures - placing constraints on how you might tell a story - perhaps only through object, or only through landscapes, and what can be conveyed if you mix them together. Another important component might be talking about layout.

Documentary/fine art photographers

The Teenie Harris Archive (CMoA)

Alec Soth

Dylan Vitone (panoramic imagery)

3. Journalism. Recording events but also using text - similar to documentary, but a different approach and could be integrated with Language Arts.

James Nachtwey

4. The Complete Imaginary - Creating scenes, sculptures, and works solely for photographic work, i.e. Thomas Demand. What changes when it is photographed versus as a sculptural work? 

Homework #6 (1.)

How I might alter the use of the image:

I liked the idea Annie had to make a three-dimensional form of the photograph using paper - I think it could be applicable to the idea I had about textures - after students photograph a texture, they find a way to translate it in a physical dimension - moving from digital to three-dimensional and perhaps back to digital.

Another idea:

"Continuing the image" - similar to short activities such as "what can you turn this shape into?," using the photograph as a starting point for a drawing / artwork where you use collage, paint, or pencil to continue the lines and spaces found in your photograph.