Film to Digital

While people, places, and events change over time, so do the technologies that we use to understand and exchange ideas about them. One important change in photography itself is the move from film to digital formats.

How has photography itself changed over time? How have cameras changed? What is a photographic negative?

How does photography fit into the world of art?

How does the time period that Teenie Harris documented (1930–70s) fit into the history of photography?

Have your students take photographs using a film camera vs. a digital camera. How is this experience different? Ask them to consider how the different technology affects their process and experience as the photographer/artist.

If you do not have cameras in your classroom, find out if your students can collaborate with your school’s newspaper or yearbook staff to use their cameras and document some aspect of school life for them to use in print.

Oral History

Many of the photographs in the Teenie Harris exhibition are linked to audio recordings of people who knew Teenie and his work . This project could present new perspectives on history and how individuals and their everyday lives play an important role in understanding and exchanging ideas about history.

Have students find an older family member or person in the community. Ask them to interview that person about a selection of Teenie Harris images from a time when they were alive.  Get their opinions and perspective of that time through the photographs. Ideally students should find people to talk to from a range of times (1930–70s) represented in Teenie Harris’s photographs.

Students could photograph the person and plot the new photographs and interviews along a historical timeline.

Make comparisons with Picturing the City photographs. Students can share their perspective on what’s happening today. Ask students to imagine being interviewed in the same way when they are older—what would they want to tell someone about what was happening “in their day”?

Share your findings with the class.

Document and share students’ current insights and opinions about the Picturing the City photographs. These ideas could be recorded using journals, writing prompts, audio recordings, or visual arts projects.

Journal as Personal Document

Teenie Harris documented over 40 years of his personal experiences and interactions with others through his photographs. You can make a small-scale version of his body of work and recognize the influence of one person over time. The photographers in Picturing the City documented the changes and people, places, and events around downtown Pittsburgh over three recent years (from 2007–2010).

Discuss what can be concluded from examining many photographs, as opposed to just one or two.

How can we document our own lives, and as artists, make these everyday occurrences interesting? What does it tell us about ourselves, our neighborhoods? The world?

How can studying the past and observing the present help us be more thoughtful about possibilities for the future?

Challenge your students to be observant of the people, places, and events around you for a short period of time (maybe a few days or a week). Different prompts could be used each week to narrow or adjust the focus for your students.

Ask your students to collect things that they find, including pictures, objects, and ideas. Have them make note of new things that they become aware of because of their observations. Ask them to share with others. What do they learn about each other through their collected observations, notes, objects, etc.?

The class could start a blog about these everyday events. As a collection, these reflections and findings become a body of work, like Teenie Harris’s body of work.

Document Your School Neighborhood

This could be implemented as a school-wide project, including teachers from a variety of disciplines, and include historical research, interviews, writing, art-making, and more. It could also occur each year to create a record of your school and neighborhood’s history—and what students want to see for its future.

Define the characteristics of your school community based on people, places, and events.  Create a list of the class’s ideas.

Research the history of your school. This might include interviews with teachers, family, and community members as well as finding sources on the internet and in the library.

Discuss how you are learning about history, as well as contributing to and preserving the school and neighborhood’s history.

Share your findings with a larger community. Remember visual arts are a way to understand and exchange ideas, so how can findings be shared visually? Think about the variety of places to share these ideas, including bulletin boards, the yearbook, school newspaper, website, blog, etc.

Discuss how your students’ research and discoveries might lead to visions about the future of their school and the community surrounding it.

Define Community through People, Places, and Events

Explore ideas of how people, places, and events shape a community. How does it relate to someone’s sense of place? How can communities change over time?

Students should pick a variety of Teenie Harris and Picturing the City photographs that they think convey the idea of community and/or a sense of place.

Brainstorm how each photograph conveys the idea of community. What are the elements that make up a community? In what ways did the artist accomplish this visually? Make a list of the class’s observations and ideas.

Ask students what is their community? How can you be part of more than one community? What are the people, places, and events that come together to create those communities? What about online communities? How do they compare to physical places? Make a list.

How do the physical and virtual communities you belong to relate to your identity? How do you shape those places— and how do they shape you?

Use photography to document a shared community: the school community! Discuss how you might use the techniques explored through Teenie Harris and Picturing the City photographs to take new photographs.

Be observant of places, people, and events around your school.

Compare photographs by Teenie Harris and Picturing the City artists with the photographs that students took of their school community. What can you learn about the people, places, and events in each? In what ways does that affect the sense of place associated with those communities or neighborhoods? How do the artists capture a sense of place in both?

Map Your Neighborhood

This works nicely as a follow up to the pre-visit suggestion for locating your school and the museum on a city map.

Revisit this map to locate the Hill District and other places Teenie Harris photographed. Locate places in downtown Pittsburgh found in Picturing the City.

Find or take photographs from your school neighborhood. Use a variety of these photographs to “illustrate” the map.

Discuss what these photographs might tell us about these different neighborhoods. How can we tell some places have changed over time? What are the relationships among neighborhoods visible through these photographs? Why have they changed?

What are students still curious about? Assign research to answer questions about places, events, and changes over time. Discuss how students’ research and discoveries might lead to visions about the future of their locations.