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.

Photographer’s Point of View

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How is a photograph important as a historical document?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.

Context for Photography

Teenie Harris was a staff photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier and he also had his own photography studio. Additionally he often captured what was going on around him because he always had his camera on hand.

Use examples to illustrate each of these various contexts for Teenie Harris’s work—newspaper photos, studio shots, and candids. You could also include examples from Picturing the City, and possibly students’ personal photographs.

Compare photographs taken for these different purposes.

Have students had their portrait taken?

Do they take photographs for the school newspaper or maybe were featured there?

Do they ever take photographs of their friends around school or hanging out? What are those experiences like?

How do these different contexts for photographs change how we understand them? How is a photograph different in a newspaper versus the museum wall? Or in a frame in someone’s home? How do our personal points of view change how we understand these photographs?

Compare a selection of Teenie Harris’s photographs of celebrities with some taken by the paparazzi (you could find some appropriate examples in magazines or on the internet). What are some contrasts you can make between the photographs themselves and how the photographers captured their subjects? What are the legal issues connected to photography?

Finding Your Favorite

Allow students to explore a selection of Teenie Harris and Picturing the City photographs and identify a few as favorites. Ask them to write about why they find each photograph compelling. They can also jot down any questions they have about the photograph.

Students could respond to specific prompts: What’s appealing? How did the artist draw your attention? What is the impact? How do these discussions help students understand the process of critique and analysis?

Become a Historian

This exercise can help students discover how history is written. A good place to start would be to research the history of the Hill District through Teenie Harris’s photographs.

Pick photos from different eras and explore how people, places, and events have changed over time—and why. You can view Harris’s photos by theme or thread to find a sequence of images with similar content that range from the 1930s to the 1970s. How is change evident in the photographs?

You can also research some of the important figures from the civil rights era.

Lead a discussion comparing Teenie Harris and the Picturing the City photographs in terms of race and gender relations.

What do you notice? How have things changed over time?

Research additional legislation since these people, places, and events were photographed (examples such as civil rights, equality, etc.).

Historical Perspectives

Compare everyday experiences to major events. How can both be considered history? How can regular activities be history as much as major events? When does something become history?

Identify both everyday occurrences and major events in your history book. What point of view about history does your textbook take? What else could be included?

Is history happening right now? Five minutes ago? Or is history only in the more distant past?

Find examples of major events represented in Teenie Harris’s work. Research how they were described in their own time. Are they discussed differently now?

Describe contemporary events from your current perspective. You can use Picturing the City photographs or ones the students take of their school neighborhood. What might it look like to someone looking back 50 years from now?

Discuss examples of trustworthy sources for history.

How do people change when they know they are being watched or photographed?

Read about Harris’s connection to the neighborhood and people he photographed.

Creating Historical Fiction

Students can create imaginative and historically based narratives, inspired by Teenie Harris and Picturing the City photographs. A combination of close observation and research on the people, places, events, and time period can produce relevant investigations.

Students should:

1. Select a photograph by Teenie Harris or a Picturing the City artist that interests them.
2. Make a list of observations (who, what, where, etc.) and jot down any questions they have about the people, places, or events.
3. Do research connected with the people, places, events, and time period.
4. Create dialogue between characters and/or imagine a larger storyline beyond the photograph.
5. Share how stories reflect both research and imagination.

The follow-up conversation could address questions like: What impact does the photograph have on me? What does it say about its time and the impact on the people who lived during those times?

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?

What Does a Photo Say about Someone?

Photographs of people can make us curious about their lives, accomplishments, and experiences. How can we use our observation skills to prompt personally relevant investigations of these photographs? How did the artist capture something important? Just because it is a photograph, does that make it important?

Choose a variety of Teenie Harris and Picturing the City photographs depicting people.

Students should observe them carefully and take note of what more they might like to know about them. Ask them to make a list of questions they would ask the people in the photographs if they could. Such as: What are you doing? Where are you and why did you go there? What did you do next?

Share their questions and reasons with classmates in small groups. Have your students ask each other the same questions about the photographs. What are the responses from classmates about the photographs?

If possible, ask students to research something further about the photographs, such as the people, location, events, or the time period. Can they find answers to any of their questions?

Discuss what happens if you can’t find anything specific about the people, places, or events. What are possible factors for this? How can we use observations to create hypotheses and back them up? How does it prompt us to keep asking questions?

Ask students to bring in a recent photograph of themselves (or use this opportunity to take new photographs during class). Students can ask similar questions of their own photograph or of their classmates’ photographs. Such as: What are you doing? Where are you and why did you go there? What did you do next? They should think about what they would want someone in the future to know about them. How does the composition of their photograph, their pose, or the setting suggest something about their identity?