In this course you will have the opportunity to explore and photograph multicultural Berlin in a supportive context. We will start off following the sociologist Howie Becker’s advice on how to get to know a city by train, bus, and on foot: how to develop a sense of its overall shape, identify its distinct neighborhoods, and then develop a more intimate understanding of particular places. As we do so, we’ll read and discuss articles on Berlin immigration history and the new economies and then go visit places where we can see what we are reading right in front of us.

We’ll also be photographing and sharing and discussing our work, as well as the work of established artists and professionals, along the way. We’ll also do some exercises in the use of light and composition that will help train our eye and inform our picture-making strategies. And finally, we’ll be using the new web communications technologies to share with each other and reach out to larger audiences. You’ll learn how to upload your digital images to online photo albums, create your own photo blog, and keep track of your many images. In sum, you’ll get a solid introduction to milticulti Berlin and the use of photographs for documentation and expression.

You need not know much about photography or Berlin — though we always have advanced photographers, art students, and urbanists or other professionals in this class. If you haven’t uploaded digital images to the web and worked on a blog, that’s no problem: it’s really easy, once you get the hang of it, and I’ll show you how. Just be sure to bring a digital camera and maybe an extra battery and chip, and if you’ve got a laptop it would be good to bring that, too, so you can sort your images on your hard drive at home. But you can also use the PC’s and Macs in the Freie Universitaet Berlin’s Zedat PC Pool, a room with a lot of machines and printers near our classroom, and you’ll get lots of help with the technology if you need it, I assure you.

I want to help you discover and convey what you have discovered. That means developing strategies for finding things that might interest you, working with what you find, selecting and sorting what you’ve collected, preparing and presenting your work to others, inviting, evaluating, and assimilating advice, and applying what you learn to the next opportunity. I’m interested in preparing you to be “reflective practitioners”, if you are familiar with the relevant research literatures on professional training, and most notably, the work of Donald Schön. This means that if you are among the third of the class that, in year’s past, includes graduate students in fields as diverse as computer science, criminology, social science, and literature, this course will be not only fun, but also, offer some very solid advice on the role of creativity and group dynamics in professional training. If you are among the third of the students, in year’s past, with artistic training or interests or goals, almost everything we will do will be completely familiar to you and anyone involved in studio art programs: most of what we will be doing I first learned hands-on as a graduate student of photography at Cranbrook Academy of Art and while teaching photography for years after that — before I made a little detour into the humanities and social sciences. In the simplest of terms, all you’ve really go to do is do what Ahmed did beautifully: look at great art, like we looked at Vermeer, and make pictures like that, as Ahmed did here.

We will be using the web a lot, as you will see on the last year’s course page, where everyone kept both web albums for the sharing of their daily work and created blogs for their final projects. Learning how to use these technologies is basic to digital photography today, so I’ll be giving you advice on the basics and sending you off with these powerful tools in your toolkit. We’ll also be using some excellent online resources, such as you’ll find in the other posts on this page, including the advice from sociology and art history noted above. You’ll also find a number of resources for the study of perspective, including the studies of Vermeer, the detailed explanations of how perspective works, and examples that helped Ahmed do his good work.

And then there’s the good advice of yourself and your peers! Much of what you will learn will come from your working closely with your classmates, and this is often the most helpful and fun! Consider, for example, the photo I made of that fabulous moment after our first tour, when we were going around the table introducing ourselves and I’d had time to drink exactly half a beer, when Liza said: “I’m from Moldavia, I study banking, and I LOVE money! Everybody: show me your money!” She was full of curiosity and mischief, but we did it, and within a minute we had money from China, the U.S., Brazil, Turkey, Europe, and Moldavia all over the table, and in the picture you see Liza expertly sorting through it and showing us how to look at it and discover things we hadn’t seen before. Such curiousity is contagious, and if the past is any guide, you can expect to become infected with it, too!

That is, I try to offer a number of different ways of thinking about problems, including, again, the methods I learned in art school and university and as a teacher and artist since then. The workshop approach insures that if you don’t really understand me you’ll have the support of your peers, somehow get “hooked” by at least one conversation, and have at your disposal lots of other advice when you might be ready for it. I will be right there reading and photographing with you, too, because I love to photograph and because art is sometimes best learned in the company of fellow artists, as I have learned and continue to learn. Although almost all of my artistic work for six years now has been rather specific, addressing a series of formal, emotional, and philosophical issues — as you’ll find by clicking the My/Current Spook link above, I’ve done a lot of photographing in cities. Sometimes I make very formal studies of streets and buildings, but at others I just have fun making snapshots, as in a walk in Neukoelln. I love making different kinds of photos and so use this month-long course to get back in touch with street photo, multiculti Berlin, and working with those new to the art.

Group work is a magical thing, and it works like this: two evenings a week when the light is especially nice we’ll all go out on this tour, everyone will be photographing on the same streets, but everyone’s pictures will be quite different, and so you’ll be presented with the riddle: “Damn! I was there, but I didn’t see that! … how did she do it?!!?”

This sometimes unsettling experience usually comes before the “a-ha!” experience, when you finallly solve some little riddle. It is unsettling because you were there, staring right at the thing in real time with someone else who managed to see it quite differently and cobble it all together in some magical way that you did not. “Damn!” you will say, and if you are luckly, you won’t sleep so well that evening and spend some time the next day trying to figure it out, and when you do, this strange, mysterious, and sometimes very productive process will be rewarding: you’ll end up seeing things you haven’t seen before as well as end up with with some new photo tools in your photo tool kit. And since this is a photo class, with all manner of acknowledgement for what you’ve done and suggestions of how things might be done better, you’ll have a chance to learn why some things might be better than others, and thereby develop your critical abilities.

This happens to me all the time, and in part this is because I put myself in the way of such creative mischief. In my own work, twice a week now for years I’ve been visiting basically the same weird abandoned places, maybe 300 rooms in four or five places outside of Berlin, that are slowly rotting into the earth and so changing with every drop of moisture, and these days I’m obsessed with about 50 cold winter cellars when the night falls and the light does these magical things. When I first get there around 3pm, the light is dumb and I wonder how on earth I will make something interesting, but I’m patient, I work with what I’ve got, and by dusk just about every time something magical happens, and about once a month, maybe one out of 120 pictures that I make, I’ll get something worth exhibiting.

That’s mostly how it works with me, and how it might work with you might be something like this: Since I’ve fallen in love with tango dancing, do it all the time, and use any excuse possible to talk about it, you can be sure that when I start talking about photographing the famous Berlin courtyards, these unusual spaces with curious mixtures of working, living, commercial, and recreational functions, I’ll advise you to walk into and around and about them as modern dancers would. This is not so far-fetched as it might at first seem. The image to the right is from a 1970 dance film, “Journeys From Berlin,” made in Berlin in front of the unusual church on the Hohenzollerndamm depicted in the film still, and where the dancer and film-maker Yvonne Rainer created a powerful meditation based on exploring that unusual space with the exotic purple glass roof over the doorway that curves up like an elephant’s tusk. It’s really something what she did. Well, the analogy I offer is very practical: that by moving systematically through a room or courtyard we get to know the objects, light, colors, etc., much, much better and because we have moved forward and back, left and right, up and down, and felt the presence of all the other objects and light and shadow and color and feeling, we will find it much, much easier to compose an image with some sophistication. In any event, moving the camera is your basic activity when photographing: finding a place to stand, figuring out what to include and exclude, and then maybe when … that’s where we make our choices, and choices are the key to expression, or? So, I don’t know if this particular explanation will work for you, but once we enter into experiment and dialogue about ways of knowing and seeing all sorts of wonderful things can and will happen.

In the illustration to the left, you’ll see how all this talk and practice with problems of light, color, detail, gesture, composition and so forth paid off for Lena, one Sunday afternoon at the milonga in the Tango Loft, where she made a simply lovely, warm, three-part composition arranged vertically, like a Japanese scroll painting. Well, I’ve danced in that place at least 100 times and made a zillion photographs, but I’ve not made anything like it: it is done so well, and I think it brings out in a very nice way the light, heat, color, and rich sensuality that makes such places simply magical. Lena showed me something I’d not seen, it was wonderful. Thanks, Lena!

So, there’s theory, including all this wonderful, sophisticated advice that we find in art history, sociology, or whatever, and then there’s the practice, the “tricks of the trade”, that you don’t often find in books (though Howie Becker and many others talk about the difference between “how to” and “know how”), and which comes out when groups addressing a common problem start comparing notes in detail: what happens when people with different backgrounds and interests decide to work together, each offering something, and end up proving that the sum is far greater than its parts.

Maybe it has to do with “lost in translation”, if you know the movie, where you find yourself in a new place with some guides, opportunities for intense friendships among fellow travelers, and the odd timelessness that happens in summers between semesters — I don’t really know, learning is basically magic to me. But after just a few lessons and examples last summer, everybody started photographing things much, much closer, and got a lot closer to their subjects, too; they started lining things up on the edges like professionals, positioning themselves so the light would come in from one side so the important stuff pops out, letting the background fall away or open up on to some other space so the picture might “breathe”, developing a feeling for timing and the “moment” and so making the picture “snap” — as Liza did when she looked for and found fellow Russians she could interview and photograph in scenes reflecing the cultures they have in common.

As Melissa did in this fine photo of a seamstress, too: how we treat the central problem of photographing multi-culti in Berlin as a more general problem of photographing persons in places and getting to know them: how to set things up, inventory the pictorial elements, find patterns in their arrangement, balance all against the light and subject , and all the while asking one’s subjects how things are going and finding out, as one does in conversation with this warm, thoughtful Turkish woman, that it is difficult to pay the rent that is going up because of the new mega-mall built down the road and how the cheap clothing such malls sell means people are buying more clothing but repairing less.

So, the basic plan is this: We meet two mornings in a university classroom to share our work and experiences and talk about the assigned readings, and we meet two evenings a week too, to tour different parts of Berlin and photograph together. During the first two weeks, we work on the basics, including the basics of digital camera controls; editing, sorting, storing, and uploading our images to web albums; developing a feeling for light, perspective, and composition; learning from some of the great photographers, and learning how to talk about photographs. During the second two weeks each student concentrates on a topic of particular interest and creates a photo blog as a final project. If everything goes to plan, you’ll learn some of the fundamentals of the art and craft as well as get to know some of this city in its particulars. If you’ve got any questions — and no question is too smart or too dumb! — simply send me an email at bruce.spear@gmail.com.