When I teach tutorials in the field, I try to step back and watch my students make decisions that will produce learning. It is difficult to keep silent and let whatever happens, happen. But that is how field tutorials must work. Photographic exploration is, by nature, a solitary adventure. I lead my students to the water, so to speak, and let them drink what they may. Later, we discuss what we may have learned from the experience. Here, I watch Christine Newman, a greatly talented high-school photographer from Toronto, shoot through the window of an abandoned building in an old mining town near Sedona. She responds to what she sees in this symbolic darkness with great care and much thought. She will produce her own interpretation of what lies within, and I hope that she will learn much from the decisions she makes on this day in Jerome.


I simultaneously photographed the same interior that Christine studies here. I would eventually share the result with Christine and all of my pbase students -- click on the thumbnail at the bottom of this caption to see it. Christine interpreted this subject quite differently, and very successfully. She expressed her own point of view about this subject with a superwide angle lens and a vertical frame, gaining useful insights into the substantive effects of lens choice, format and framing. Meanwhile, Christine’s mother Pauline, who accompanied her to Arizona, interprets this moment in learning for both of us. She comments here on how I choose to teach, and how her daughter chooses to learn. (You can see Christine’s own pbase gallery at: http://www.pbase.com/christinepnewman