Passion

I am not a writer.  Nor a photographer.  Though I appreciate both good writing and good photography.  Sometimes inspiration simply does not come, and yet, the deadline approaches. 

This week I left the country that has been my home for six years.  Bittersweet.  My mind is, perhaps, more focused on my tropical past than my frigid present. 

I am not currently teaching classes.  I taught 3^rd-4^th grades in a private school in Lansing, Michigan for 4 years.  After that, we moved to Bolivia and I taught math and music to secondary students in a jungle boarding school for six years.  I moved from the jungle to Santa Cruz in October.   I was on the verge of signing a contract to teach at an English school when a series of events…compelling experiences, if you will…threw me on a fast track back to the United States.  

So, here I sit thinking about the relationship between photography and teaching.  While reading “How to Make Great Photographs” on www.kenrockwell.com, I particularly resonated with the idea of passion in a photograph.  “Photography is the art of communicating passion. You need to be passionate about whatever it is that you photograph. If you are passionate you'll get great results, if you don't care, you won't.”  Is it not the same with teaching?  We, as educators, must all admit that there have been days when we have been less than passionate about what we were teaching.  I remember being in my Elementary Math Methods class during my undergraduate experience.  I was in the class with about 15 or 20 other elementary education majors.  The professor asked us how many of us liked math.  I was the only one in my class that raised her hand.  The only one.  Many scowled and groaned indicating that the only reason they would even teach math in their elementary school classrooms was because it was a requirement.  I would imagine that this is not uncommon among the elementary education majors even today.  If our elementary teachers have no passion for math, how will they communicate a love of math to their students.  And with no passion, no great results can be expected,  just like in photography.

CEP882 - Photo project

I traveled some 5000 miles back to Lansing, Michigan from Santa Cruz, Bolivia this week.  Before I left, I made a point to snap some photographs of the cathedral located on the central plaza of the city.  I have been to that plaza countless times during my six years in Bolivia, and it has become a special place for me.  

Capturing my feelings about Bolivia in a digital photograph proved to be extremely challenging for me.  Though I like to take pictures, I have never considered myself a great photographer.  And trying to communicate to others the feelings that I have when I see that plaza became almost frustrating to me during this project.  There are always cultural nuances that are not easily conveyed in a photograph.  In fact, they are not easily conveyed as part of a two-week visit to a particular place.  It is something that must be experienced by becoming part of the culture.

In any case, I started with a view of the cathedral as a whole building during the daytime.  In this photo you can see the throngs of people who are present on any given weekend.   However, it wasn’t the people that I was interested in, rather it was the place.  So I snapped some photographs from different angles, trying to eliminate the majority of the people from the scene.  I then cropped them a bit and converted them to sepia tones.  Better…but they still didn’t say anything I wanted them to say.  Finally I shuffled through some photos I took of the plaza during a nighttime visit during the Christmas season.  I found a photo of the cathedral at night time.  There is something “magical” about the plaza at nighttime.  The lights are spectacular.  The sights and sounds are inviting.  And the cathedral takes on a particularly majestic look all lit up.  I tried to capture that mood in the last picture.  (Though, admittedly, I am still somewhat unsatisfied and open to suggestions.)