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How we did it
What a picture!
NUT member, lecturer Justin Quinnell, explains how he got his BA photography students at University College Falmouth teaching schoolchildren photographic techniques old and new, with a little help from the National Trust and some beer cans!
Most young people between the ages of about 16 and 25 don’t have much opportunity to interact with children. Similarly, many children don’t have the chance to mix with students and fi nd out what university is like. And a lot of students at university never find out about the local community. So I was delighted to have the opportunity to take 28 of my photography students to teach photographic processes to children from Newlyn, St Just and St Hilary primary schools near Land’s End.
Humphrey Davy, who invented the miner’s safety lamp in this area of Cornwall, was one of the originators of photography 200 years ago, and the National Trust locally wanted to do some work on pinhole photography. They organised a space for us to work at Bottalick Mines near St Just. Funding came from the Trust and the university.
We set up a temporary darkroom in the Count House at the mines and worked with groups of 25 to 55 year 4 and 5 children. They spent half a day making pinhole cameras out of beer cans, doing time exposures, then watching their images magically appear in the darkroom. For the other half of the day the students taught the children to use digital cameras creatively, experimenting with low angles, different positions of the sun, ‘micro’ settings and so on. The children all took away pinhole cameras with a six-month duration exposure that they can use to make a ‘solargraph’ – an image of the sun tracking across the sky.
The students were nervous to start with. Most had never encountered a group of 55 children before! The way they interacted was fascinating; students aren’t like teachers, but they’re not peers either. Instead they’re facilitators, working with the children in a way teachers or parents don’t.
Most photography education in schools has become very screen-based. A lot of processes are automated. Often pupils are clicking without really seeing. Pinhole photography covers chemistry, physics, history, art, the environment, astronomy – you don’t get all that with digital photography! There’s a wonder in a projected image that just isn’t there in technology. And it’s democratic – anyone can afford a drink-can camera and produce a stunning image.
The university exhibited the children’s work at the end of the project. The photos were mounted and framed, and the pupils came with their families and teachers. There was a real sense of occasion. West Cornwall is isolated and there’s considerable rural deprivation, so it’s good to familiarise the children with the university and open up higher education as a potential future for them.
I’d thoroughly recommend other schools to try something similar. If there’s a photography degree course in your area, get in touch. Many universities will make funding available for this kind of project. And everyone loves photography!
• Find out more at
www.pinholephotography.org
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