Someone Out There Likes Me

Susan Sontag tells us that as tourists we try to capture our travels in photographs like so much brick-a-brack to take home and reminisce over rather than experience. Yet what does it mean that nowadays we share those possessions not just with our families and friends who have been lured into a boring slide show by the promise of dinner and drinks, but with...who knows who might be out there?

I posted my best photos from my vacation to Prague on flickr. Perhaps most importantly I took the time to tag them something simple like "Prague" or "Prague Summer 2009." And now one of those photographs (of the terrific breakfast buffet at the Hotel Maximilian) was chosen to be included in the Schmap Guides.

I agreed, of course I agreed. Now I know someone out there likes my work enough to publish it, enough to use it to illustrate the funky elegance of a lovely hotel in Prague where my husband and I spent several delightful days last July. Now I have an audience.

If it feels this good for someone like me -- an amateur photographer and at the same time a teacher who has been around the cobblestone lane a few times -- imagine what such recognition feels like to our students who are discovered and read and validated in ways I could not imagine when I was their age.

I think I need to go take some more pictures now...

Photo-blogging

What is the essence of the photo-blog? Is it the photo, or the blog, or something else that is created by putting the two together?

My 10th-graders created photographs to respresent the concept of "Self-Reliance" in response to Emerson's essay and after following the adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Then they honed their own ideas in relation to the pictures at "A Month (Almost) of Self-Reliance." What is this thing that they have created that is part reflection, part commentary, part artistic inspiration? What are the skills they are learning? Writing (short) for the web, connecting images and ideas, collaboration (they worked in pairs), selection and critical thinking, interpreting, communicating. What are they learning about themselves?