A photographer’s decisions are never completely unbiased. There are lots of choices to be made such as: What is included? What isn’t?

You could make a comparison to painting. What choices does a painter make? How are these similar? What’s different? Why might some people argue that photography isn’t really art, that it is just capturing “real life?” Ask students to use Teenie Harris and Picturing the City photographs to defend the fact that a photographer makes interpretative decisions about what they’re documenting.

How is a photograph important as a historical document? What are the strengths/weaknesses of using a photograph to make inferences about historical people/places? How do we use photographs in our current lives?

What visual information is factual and what is interpretive? How does it reflect the photographer’s point of view?

Experiment with “viewfinders” to help students understand how the frame of the photograph can influence what is and isn’t seen by the viewer in the final photograph.

What more can we learn from multiple views that we cannot learn from just one?

What is different when certain information is or isn’t included?

If you have access to cameras, allow students to experiment by taking a series of photographs of the same place and/or same person from different perspectives. If you have a limited number of cameras, find ways to break students into groups and use this as an opportunity to practice sharing.