Je ne sais plus d’où j’ai tiré cet échange, mais il pourrait être le manifesto d’un cours Image ayant une approche reflexive.

– Do you think it’s important to tell a history of photography or do you think that that is sort of a 20th century goal?

– I think it’s hugely important to talk about the history of the medium because it’s not quite a universal language. And the idea that we’re all visually literate is not quite true.

We can all probably extract some very basic level of information from photographs. But I think you have to learn to understand how images work and how images are constructed.

Who made the picture, why they make the picture, who edited the picture, who cropped the picture, who captioned the picture, what pictures did they leave out, what pictures are being censored. It’s a malleable medium and I think people need to be aware of that.

That’s one of the big goals in visual literacy, is for people to understand how many different ways you can make and use and understand any kind of image. There’s nothing like it. There’s no other experience like it. Because when we’re walking around the world, you don’t have time to see everything around you. For a moment, you can stop something and look at it in a way that you normally wouldn’t see it.

And I think that’s part of the real fascination with still photography. It’s kind of very existential, philosophical kind of medium. It lets you step outside yourself to kind of look at the world in a different way.