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Hello there, I'm Mark Sullivan and I'll be one of the instructors of the course.
Before diving into the work on photography,
I want to give you a short overview of my own history as a photographer.
It's a bit of a winding history and as another unusual twist.
Over the last 25 years of my activity as a photographer, I've also been
a professional composer, writing music and teaching at the university.
The story starts in senior year of in high school.
I borrowed my father's Yashica DSLR film camera and
started taking pictures around the St. Louis area where I lived.
That was the beginning.
Here are a few of the first shots from that year of photography.
This is a scene behind the restaurant where I worked as a dish washer and
is one of the rolls of photographs that I took when I was 17 years old.
There are two other shots here, one from the same location of a piece
of farm equipment which at the time I treated as an abstract.
The other is a shot in a parking lot with some friends of mine that I tried to
put into a kind of urban pose.
And then, one final one from a few months later,
which is of one of those famous happenings in a city park.
I kept on taking photographs and
about six months later I went on a camping trip to Canada.
I took one photograph, that when I took it I thought would be quite special.
But when I had the film developed and
looked at the negative it actually didn't look so good.
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Lots of dark areas and almost nothing visible.
It wasn't until later, when I saw it on a light table,
that I realized what I thought when I took the shot was right.
It was something special.
What I saw convinced me that I wanted to keep taking photographs,
and now 45 years later, I still am.
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After entering college, I took photography courses for two years.
I learned how to use an SLR, a single lens reflex,
the predecessor of the current DSLR.
And I also learned how to use medium and large format cameras.
I love the darkroom.
Spent many nights there developing negatives and printing.
There was no Internet and no social media for sharing.
Usually, you'll have a few conversations with other photographers and
among friends and maybe, at some point, you got an exhibition.
If you worked at it, you could get your work around, but
it wasn't anywhere near as easy as it is nowadays.
I never dreamed a day it would come when you could get your work out around
the world in a few minutes.
Not long after that, I got my first paying job as a photographer,
documenting a theatre production at my college.
I was able to borrow a medium format film camera,
a twin lens reflex Rolleiflex, a wonderful camera.
And I also borrowed an upperclassman's film camera, a Pentax SLR.
At this point, everything was still done with film.
Photographing rehearsals and run throughs of the play presented some new and
strikingly different challenges from taking shots of nature, or
shots in the street or even in the studio.
Just to jump back to the present for a moment, I'd like to show some images from
that time that demonstrate something interesting.
Even in the beginning of your work, it's possible to take meaningful photographs.
For example, these two images here,
were shot in the first two years of my work with photography.
About ten years ago I scanned them and posted them on social media.
Each is now received multiple thousands of visits and many, many comments.
Many more than some of my most recent pictures.
As you develop as a photographer, you might create works
of high quality even though you're just beginning to learn.
And you'll notice, that no matter how much experience you acquire,
each image you take will not always be a stunning distinctive success.
After working for a couple of years, I returned to the university, but
this time to pursue another passion, music.
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To completing two advanced degrees for the next 30 years or
so, I developed a career as a music composer.
Through all this time and
even when I became a professor, I continued taking photographs and was able
to integrate studying the work of a wide range of photographers and photography.
Not only into my free time but also into courses I thought.
One, on arts relationship to society, and
another an interdisciplinary course on the arts in the Americas.
As an artist, I also took part in a wide range of interdisciplinary projects
stretching across computer science, cybernetics, rhetoric, physics,
cinema, poetry, and yes, photography.
And here and there, now and again, over and over, I found time for photography.
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Various things happened that little by little
led me to become ever more involved with photography.
I became increasingly involved with artists working across media,
some working in several media.
I worked with a filmmaker who is active as a photographer,
I worked with a rock musician who became a music photographer and more importantly,
I've been working with young people who went from a photography project to a film
project to a music project, without any anxiety about who they were.
Whether they were a photographer, or a filmmaker, or composer.
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The process of digitizing these negatives, not only forced me to organize them, but
it gave me a chance to look over all that I had done.
I was generally quite amazed and determined that I should find a way to
connect with the potential I saw there and to begin a fresh to create photographs.
Around this time social networking exploded the range of contacts.
Suddenly I began posting more and more.
Both my older work and
my current work were getting responses from an international audience.
This dynamic began to amplify and transform my work of and
the responses I receive from many people and
many walks of life encouraged me and inspired me and that's still happening.
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Another exciting project involved each person making a photography book.
The results were amazing.
You will have the chance at some point in the future to make a book, and
there may at some point be a course that allows you to do so.
In some ways even though not as extensive or detailed,
the response to images posted on social media is like the response you get from
another person who views your photographs and tells you things about them.
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And that goes to show sometimes you might be
very surprised by which images resonate with other people.
Sometimes an image might resonate more with others than it does with you.
But we'll get to that later when we turn to looking at ways to go about responding
to photographs both your own and those of others.
For now, let's say the history is up to date.
[MUSIC]
Peter GlendinningProfessor
Mark Valentine SullivanAssociate Professor
