FRAMING “THE PHOTOGRAPHIC SELF” IN EDUCATION PROGRAMS FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS IN RUSSIA AND SWEDEN

Abstract

The aim of this study is to understand the ‘photographic selves’ – the collective competences and skills required for making, interpreting, and communicating through photographs — that are articulated in the educational framework for future photographers in Russia and Sweden. These are two countries with very different histories in relation to photographic practices. Theories on photography from recent decades have emphasized that digital photography is a different medium from analogue photography. This study seeks to understand whether and how this is addressed in two different cultural contexts, based on interviews with teachers and department heads, combined with written descriptions of courses and educational programs. The material makes visible different ideal photographic practices. One, the most common in both countries, is firmly embedded in the international documentary tradition. Other ways, represented by teachers at a Russian art school for photography, stress a more critical perspective toward established conventions. However, absent at the studied schools are more freer understandings of photography in the wake of digitization. Photography is still framed by the historically anchored indexical relation to the surrounding world and as a fixed object.

Introduction

In Daston & Galison’s study on the history of objectivity in science, the authors argue that image-making and image-reading became the core of science from the 18^th century onward, and that these collective visual competences constitute ‘the scientific self’.¹ They demonstrate how scientists have worked with images to negotiate scientific truths during different periods of time, and show how the understanding of images’ relation to ‘reality’ has changed over time, constituting different ‘scientific selves’ in line with different research paradigms. In a similar way, this article suggests that it is possible to talk about ‘photographic selves’ in visual education programs in which students are to develop certain skills and competences at certain points in time involving how a professional photographer should work with images to communicate to the viewer about the surrounding world.

The aim of this study is to understand the ‘photographic selves’ articulated in the educational framework for future photographers in an era that has been characterized by: a distrust in photography’s documenting status²; a widespread circulation of (amateur) photographs on social media³; and an era that may provide new opportunities to professionally work with photographs.⁴ This study investigates photography education programs in Russia and Sweden, two countries with different histories of photographic practices, in order to get a broader picture of how photography is taught today. The framing of the photographic selves is studied here based on interviews with teachers and department heads, combined with written descriptions of courses and educational programs.

Earlier research

At the beginning of the 1990s, Darren Newbury conducted a research project on contemporary British photographic education programs and “the different ways in which photography is constructed as a subject to be taught and learnt’”⁵ He concluded that photo education programs are quite conservative and need to adapt to both technical and institutional transformations, as well as a widespread demand for improved visual literacy in society.⁶

According to Newbury, the low status of the professional photographer results in an urge among educators and students to mark distinctions from vernacular uses of photography. However, as Newbury states, this strategy of isolating the profession from everyday photographic practices also blocks out possibilities. He proposes that an alternative way to develop photographic education programs would be to embrace photography’s social and cultural use. Including popular uses of photography in the curriculum could result in a more reflective photographic practice. What Newbury suggests (much in line with contemporary photographic theory⁷) is that education programs should move from treating photography as ‘text’ to focusing more on social and cultural practices.

More than ten years later, in 2009, Newbury was part of a group of photographers and educators at a symposium addressing the future of photographic education. This meeting resulted in a special issue of the journal photographies. In an article by one of the more ‘radical’ participants, Daniel Rubinstein discusses the way photographic education programs have met the ‘new media’ environment.⁸ Rubinstein comes to the same conclusion as Newbury before him, that photographic education programs do not focus on the broader social and cultural practices, and thereby also miss the opportunity to place digital photography at the center of the digital media culture. According to Rubinstein, education programs ‘[attempt] in vain to prolong [their] survival by clinging to the historical moment of photography, not realizing that this moment has passed … ’⁹ To him, photography is no longer a fixed object (what Cmiel & Durham Peters have called a ‘container of meaning’¹⁰) but is instead constantly changing depending on context and use: ‘ … it is reproduction, not representation that forms the essence of the digital image’.¹¹

To summarize, the criticism these scholars express is that education programs are too isolated from the vernacular uses of photography in their surrounding societies. They are understood as having been developed to meet the demands of the art world or the media industry, and not have the primary goal of strengthening a more democratic visual communication.¹² This is also said to have consequences on how the programs deal with technological changes. Despite the shift from analogue to digital images in the 1990s and the development of the Internet at the beginning of the 21^st century, photographic education programs are said to cling to old assumptions about the analogue photograph. Studies of professional photographers also underline what they understand as a quite conservative attitude toward digital technology; ethical and moral codes that were developed during the analogue era are still cherished.¹³ According to Lavoi, it is particularly photojournalism’s roots in the documentary tradition that are experienced as being under threat in the digital era, not the mechanical registration.¹⁴ Mäenpää & Seppänen have shown that what they call ‘the darkroom principle’ often becomes the photographer’s solution.¹⁵ To put it simply, what you could do in the darkroom during the analogue era should also guide your practices when it comes to the digital photograph.

This article will follow up on how education programs frame photography and how they teach students to communicate through photographs, by looking at contexts beyond the UK experience and focusing on how the teachers themselves understand ideal practices of photography. How is the relationship between the photographer’s subjective intentions and photography’s documenting qualities understood? What are the most significant ways of approaching photography as a technology? What are considered important competences and skills for making and interpreting photographs, and how can they be related to today’s visual culture?

Russia and Sweden represent quite different histories of photography. During the Soviet era, the only way to become a photographer was to enter a program offered at a university journalism department.¹⁶ In journalism, the indexicality of photographs was important and pictures were often reduced to mere illustrations of the written text.¹⁷ At the same time, there has long been a widespread public mistrust of pictures as being censored, manipulated, and serving those in power.¹⁸ In contrast, in Sweden photojournalism has typically occupied a relatively strong position as part of a journalism with the ideal of objectivity as a norm, and there is also an internationally acclaimed documentary tradition.¹⁹

The photographic self

Since its invention at the beginning of the 19^th century, photography has had a special relationship with the outside world (its indexical status) and has been an important vehicle for gaining knowledge about the world. However, research in disciplines such as art history, media studies, anthropology, and history of science highlights the importance of adding practices around photography to understand how its documenting and indexical status is negotiated in specific contexts and is not something that can be taken for granted.²⁰ This article aligns with this perspective, highlighting how educators frame professional photographic practices for documenting the world. In their visual culture approach, Daston and Galison highlight such practices in the history of objectivity in science. They find three different personas corresponding to three different negotiated epistemological beliefs in images: the sage (‘truth-to-nature’), the indefatigable worker (‘mechanical objectivity’), and the intuitive expert (‘trained judgment’).²¹ Even though Daston and Galison describe a historical progress with these different ideals and practices, the ideals overlap and can best be understood as different layers. The truth-to-nature ideal, emerging in the 18^th century, aimed to find the typical (not the unique) and resulted in ‘the reasoned image’ with the goal of showing the ‘essential’.²² The scientist worked with artists to make the perfect image, and there was no opposition between truth and beauty. On the other hand, mechanical objectivity, emerging at the end of the 19^th century, is characterized by a reliance on machines, for instance cameras, to capture reality as it is without ‘distortions’ of humans’ perception and will. In this ideal, it is the unique and the imperfect that are celebrated and the image is clearly separated from art. In the middle of the 20^th century, according to Daston and Galison, a new ‘scientific self’ – the intuitive expert — emerged, required instead to have a trained eye in both making and interpreting images in order to synthesize, to see patterns and relationships. Today, they argue, we are seeing a shift from how these three scientific selves dealt with image as representation to image as presentation — in their words: ‘image-as-process … a tool to make and change things … meant to be used, cut, correlated, rotated, colored…’²³

Daston and Galison’s three scientific personas do not overlap in time with ideals in the history of photography, but can be used when discussing photographers’ different ways of relating to the world.²⁴ The sage (truth-to-nature) resembles how photographers have traditionally worked in the documentary tradition, combining facts with feelings and striving to find the essential symbolic image in artistically composed photographs.²⁵ The indefatigable worker (mechanical objectivity) is closer to the press photographer, gathering visual facts by being at the right place at the right time. Here, authenticity is more important than the picture’s quality. The intuitive expert (trained judgment) can be translated as someone who has competence in combining pictures to tell a story and possesses skills in ‘reading’ images in order to understand their meaning. However, as suggested by earlier research, the move from analogue to digital technology and the centrality of the Internet and social media platforms provide an environment that may call for new skills in interpreting, classifying, combining, and reflecting upon pictures. Photography scholars have also emphasized that the digitization of photography has released it from ‘the burden of representation’,²⁶ with the possibility now to use them as resources in an ongoing broader social and cultural communication — a move to ‘image-as-process’.

Epistemological beliefs in photography are shaped in complex relationships between photographers, institutional settings, circulation, users, etc. In this way, the educational context is just one framing aspect in the wider collective processes of forming photographic selves. However, it is a context that should prepare the future photographer for the relationships that are constitutive of how meaning is ascribed to photography and give it agency.²⁷ In this way, education programs articulate ideals in the professional photographic community concerning collective practices that are considered important for communicating through photographs in today’s visual culture. However, how the educators’ framing is perceived by students, and what tensions may arise between established photographers (teachers) and a new generation of professionals (students) is beyond the scope of this article.

Educational contexts

The photo schools chosen for this study are the Nordic Photography School (NPS) outside Stockholm in Sweden, and the Department of Photojournalism and Media Technologies at Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU) and the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia (RMS) in Russia. These schools have relatively small classes, around 10–20 students in each class, and have good reputations in their respective country; furthermore, several of their alumni are celebrated practicing photographers. Focusing on two countries with very different histories of objectivity, realism, and art,²⁸ and three schools with quite different orientations, makes it equally interesting to look for similarities as for differences. If there are similarities, it is possible to talk about more general trends in education programs for photography.

NPS is a three-year higher vocational school situated on the small island of Biskops-Arnö, northwest of Stockholm (Figure 1). Established in 1982, today it is the only longer educational program for photojournalism and documentary photography in Sweden. Its special focus on the documentary tradition has been broadened to currently include other photographic genres to meet the demands of the market. Being a vocational program means that the education is developed in close collaboration with employers and the media industry. The program recently changed its name from ‘Photographer-photojournalist’ to ‘Professional photographer-photography and moving image’, signaling a broadening of how the photographic self is understood. What used to be an education to enable a graduate to get a full-time job as a photojournalist at a newspaper or magazine has today shifted into a broad education to prepare students for work in different photographic fields.

Fig. 1. The Nordic Photography School is situated on the small island of Biskops-Arnö, northwest of Stockholm. Photo by Liudmila Voronova.

The education program in photojournalism at MSU was the first at the university level in the USSR, and since the 1970s has been part of the media technologies department (Figure 2). The ‘Photojournalism’ module allows students to specialize in photography during the last two years of their four-year bachelor’s education. Before entering this specialization, students have studied journalism and mass communication for two years. According to the university website (2019), after completing the two-year specialization in photography the student has historical as well as contemporary knowledge of photography and photojournalism, and is able to work with professional photo equipment in a digital media environment.

Fig. 2. MSU is located in an old building in central Moscow opposite the Kremlin. Students are expected to take part in exhibitions, with their photos printed and hung on the walls at the top of the main staircase. Photo by Liudmila Voronova.

RMS was established in 2006 as a school for teaching a combination of contemporary art and the documentary tradition in photography. The school is affiliated with the Museum of Multimedia in Moscow, and during our visit was even partly located at the museum (Figure 3). ‘The art of photography and multimedia’ at RMS is a three-years, full-time program, but does not result in a formal degree. Students take a block of compulsory courses in, for instance, history of photography, photo composition, media theory, and contemporary art, and are then free to combine these with optional courses during their first two years. A student interested in photography can choose, for example, ‘Straight photography’ and ‘Project photography’. The courses also change according to the interest of the teachers. The last year in the three-year program is devoted to an individual project, which is presented at a joint exhibition at the end of the year.

Fig. 3. Entrance hall at the Museum of Multimedia in Moscow. The Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia is affiliated with the museum. Photo by Liudmila Voronova.

Written material from these three schools’ websites was collected between 2018 and 2021, and face-to-face interviews in Russia (1 faculty head, 1 department head, and 5 teachers at MSU, and 1 department head and 3 teachers at RMS) were conducted in 2018 to 2019, and in Sweden (1 department head and 2 teachers at NPS (one of them online via Zoom)) in 2020. The interviews with the educators were structured around certain themes: the teachers’ backgrounds; their thoughts about important competences, the relationship between photography and reality, and the relationship between different genres; and their ideas about future education programs.

The transcribed interviews and written material were then analyzed and structured with a departure point in the discussion about the photographic self above: the role of the photographer as an artist in relation to photographs’ documenting qualities; how photography as a technology is framed; and what are considered to be the most significant skills for making and interpreting photographs.

The photographer as an artist

One of the teachers at NPS, a highly acclaimed Swedish documentary photographer, contrasts their school’s approach to photography with the master’s program in photography at the Valand art school in Gothenburg, Sweden:

I’ve seen students who have studied with me and worked professionally a couple of years, and then attended a master class at Valand. Afterwards they almost … despise the documentary picture./ … /[they have learned that] the documentary picture is actually a lie from the beginning and therefore uninteresting.

(Teacher A, NPS)

Implicit in this quote is a continued hope in the documentary photograph despite the criticism of the tradition that has been common since the end of the 20^th century as well as the changing media landscape.²⁹ The school’s rootedness in the documentary tradition also frames the teacher’s understanding of visual storytelling, which is emphasized as an ideal at NPS. Teacher A again: ‘ … our training… It strives for storytelling with roots in the documentary tradition’. This is understood as a practice that involves documenting the surrounding society and, in the words of the department head, distinguishing their education from that of art schools:

It has a lot to do with forcing them [students] to approach other people – that may be what separates us from art schools … What’s the difference compared to the storytelling we practice? I usually say ‘Well, it’s that you take your finger out of your navel and start looking outside and start looking for what happens to other people’. To put it simply, be interested in things outside yourself – and tell about it. (department head, NPS)

In a similar way, MSU wants to distinguish its education from that offered at art schools, as expressed by this teacher with a broad experience of practicing documentary photography in the Russian context:

However, when a student chooses something abstract like ‘Surrealism in photography in the 20^th century’, our teachers and the evaluating panel ask them ‘Where’s the journalism here?’ This isn’t the Rodchenko School of Photography; this is a department of journalism. And we require that their thesis be related to journalism. (Teacher C, MSU)

So, there is a clear idea at these schools in Russia and Sweden that both photojournalism and the documentary photograph are the opposite of something ‘abstract’ in the art world. However, these traditions in photography do not deny the subjective artistic dimensions — or the importance — of art in the history of photojournalism and documentary photography: ‘If you look at the photography of the 19^th and the 20^th centuries, you will discover that many photographers knew art really well and studied it’ (department head, MSU).

At the Russian art school RMS, the relationship between photography and art is surprisingly complex. One of the teachers, who is responsible for the students’ exhibitions and has a background as a documentary photographer, says: ‘I’ve had a lot of arguments about whether documentary photography is contemporary art or not, but it’s always been a big part of the art world for me’ (Teacher I). But at the same time, this teacher believes it is important to draw a line between the documentary tradition and more journalistic photographic practice. This is stressed even more by her fellow teacher at RMS, who holds courses in straight photography: ‘Also, it’s possible to say that I’m a visual artist who works with documentary photography. But I’m by no means a photojournalist or a journalist’ (Teacher J). This teacher abandoned news photography for documentary photography just a couple of years after the fall of the Soviet Union.

It seems very important to these teachers to distinguish themselves from journalism, and from mass media more generally. From their perspective, the legacy media does not allow either media users or media practitioners to think for themselves. Teacher J also expresses an ambivalent relationship with the documentary tradition. Because of the many manipulations in the history of documentary photography, he rather aligns with the tradition called straight photography, as it developed in Germany in the 1920s. This is how he understands photography as contemporary art, with possibilities to offer critical perspectives on today’s society:

Contemporary art does not measure itself within the framework of looking for beauty. It is more focused on exploring and studying what society is. Roughly speaking, it fights with the mass culture. It rethinks everything mainstream and everything that capitalism, mass media, and the rest of it impose on us.

Opposing commercial interests is a traditional position in the art world, but the quote above can also be read as a criticism of how photography has been reduced to artistic styles (‘beauty’) in today’s documentary photography.

At RMS, the teachers agree that the photographer should not impose certain understandings on the viewer. Instead, photography should be used to critically involve and engage the viewer. However, there are different positions among the teachers at RMS regarding how to understand the role of the photographer in relation to this task. Teacher K, responsible for the ‘Project photography’ course, has a background as a photographer for magazines but is now a highly celebrated practicing new media artist. He explicitly expresses a disbelief in the artistic dimension of photographs. According to him, the focus on the photographer as an artist and on intentional meaning must be abandoned. Instead, the photograph, as machine vision, can serve art:

Actually, it isn’t a bad thing that we can use photography in order to help contemporary art. We can insert some documentary elements into wider contexts. Photography on its own isn’t enough. (Teacher K, RMS)

Teacher K mentions how photography was used by the Russian avant-garde after the Revolution — among them Alexander Rodchenko, for whom this school is named — as a tool to perceive the world in new ways.³⁰ In his interpretation of this photographic practice, it is the context rather than the possible intention of the photographer that can open the eyes of the beholder.

The role of technology

According to Teacher K at RMS, because everyone today can so easily practice artistic photography, this role of the professional photographer is outdated:

I want to see something else in photography, and social media are helping make it happen. Social media are replacing the photographer. And it's working. Overall, there’s no need for an author’s point of view/ … /We need to reduce the author’s point of view to avoid taking a single photo and showing it the way celebrated Cartier-Bresson does it, with a composition and some lines aligning. I find it sickening.

His conclusion is that the high circulation of photographs on social media creates opportunities for another type of photography. However, what he asserts is not that the new role of the photographer is that you can do things with the digital image but rather that the circumstances are right for using the documenting qualities, with the camera as a machine. In this way, the photographer becomes someone who knows how to use the affordances of the mechanic eye, not someone who adds meaning to the image. There are similarities here to how scientists, according to Daston & Galison, worked with photographs in line with mechanical objectivity; but at the same time, Teacher K stresses the importance of contextualizing photographs, which should be closer to how Daston & Galison define the intuitive expert. However, according to him, the role of the ‘conceptual photographer’ entails creating spaces to activate and engage the viewer rather than acting as an expert.

The other interviewed teachers at the RMS art school have similar ideas about using the camera’s technical affordances and involving the viewer, although they still believe in the interpretative role of the photographer. The artist is someone who can use the camera as a tool to break with established photographic conventions and thereby open spaces for interpretations. This ideal of practicing photography is quite contrary to how the teachers at MSU and NPS approach photography as a technology. At both these schools, camera technology is framed in a way to teach students to master the digital technology and find their subjective expression in line with long-established practices. At NPS, the information folder on the program stresses that ‘the better you master the camera technique, the more creative you can be as a professional photographer’. However, in this context, being creative is not framed as breaking with conventions of representation. The syllabus rather highlights how different technical dimensions such as aperture, shutter, light meter, and working with different lenses have an impact on the visual storytelling in the documentary tradition.

Working with different types of light is an area of general technical skills that NPS and MSU have identified as especially important for future photographers. Both in their syllabi and in the interviews, working with different light sources in the studio is mentioned. At NPS, one of the most common photographic tasks is said to be taking not only portraits but also pictures of products, food, etc. Photographing food was initially questioned by one of the teachers at NPS with a background in news photography, but this teacher then realized that this is one of the assignments in which work with light can be trained:

I’ve thought about that [course]: ‘Is it really necessary?’ But it’s turned out that many [students] actually take pictures of food during their internship./ … /After all, everything is about – it’s also about lighting. Which of course can be applied to other things than food./ … /Because a great job with lighting … works as a distinction – you know, if you choose between several pictures you’re able to see who masters this technique and who doesn’t. (Teacher B, NPS)

This teacher also explicitly mentions content marketing as a photographic practice in which knowledge of how to work with different types of light is of great importance. This growing market in the wake of the Internet and social media is also an area that is identified as offering many job opportunities for future photographers. Compared to traditional advertising, content marketing is also in line with the school’s focus on storytelling. Also, MSU, with its stronger focus on photojournalism, emphasizes studio photography and how skills in different kinds of lighting are important for future career opportunities and how this serves as a way to distinguish the professional photographer from the amateur.

Common to teachers at both the Russian MSU and the Swedish NPS is that they mention contests and exhibitions outside the school environment as guidelines for what is and is not allowed to do with digital technology when practicing photojournalism or documentary photography. As expressed by Teacher A at NPS:

You should never remove anything from the photograph that was there at the moment of exposure; nor may you add anything to the image/ … /However, in Photoshop you can change things that you could change in a traditional darkroom. You’re allowed to work with contrast, darken up or lighten down, and also correct the color a little, but not in a way that it distorts reality/ … /you must never break that principle, and that’s how it is in all these big competitions, like World Press Photo: they request raw files from the awarded photographers.

This quote is an explicit example of what in earlier research has been coined ‘the darkroom principle’.³¹ However, the quote also expresses that, with the advent of digital technology, the negative has been replaced by a digital file. Students at NPS are therefore trained in how to keep raw files, store and sort their files, and prepare them in different formats depending on the client. Because of this school’s labor market orientation, this knowledge is a way to make students employable. Another difference from the analogue era is that both NPS and MSU stress the importance of the future photographer having skills in multimedia representations. At MSU, before entering the photojournalism module, students take general courses in ‘multimedia technology’ and how to work on different platforms, and conduct a ‘multimedia project’. NPS explicitly stresses competences in working with still and moving images, as well as sound, as generic skills that can be used to tell a story in different genres, such as information, news, documentary, and content marketing. This framing of multimedia technology is thought to enhance earlier photographic practices in the documentary tradition, not break with them.

Training judgment in making and interpreting photographs

The framing of multimedia at MSU and NPS can also exemplify what Teacher K, the new media artist at RMS, understands as an overly strong focus on the image. This is why he has turned to contemporary art, which, according to him, ‘is less visual … it is not preoccupied with the image and its qualities.’ To him, intentional image-making and image-reading should not be part of the photographer’s task. Instead, the photographer should have the skills and be capable of making the right judgments to create photographic projects that can make the viewer an intuitive expert — to see patterns and reflect on photographs as mechanically produced documents.

At RMS, students’ judgment is trained in close collaboration between the ‘master’, such as Teacher K, and the students. The goal has been to attract interesting artists and give them free rein to develop their own courses. Students apply to courses given by a known artist, because they are interested in his or her work. Another ‘master’ is Teacher J, who teaches classes in straight photography. Instead of abandoning the interpretative artistic dimension of image-making, Teacher J aims to sharpen the students’ critical gaze on the surrounding society and help them find new photographic expressions. Teacher J also makes it clear that admiration for the ‘master’ should have its limits:

… my task isn’t to create clones. Sometimes I show my works, sometimes I don’t. It depends on the class. I do this because I don’t like it when they start copying you. I would like them to develop on their own. But I think that the right option is when they copy you at first and then do something on their own. (Teacher J, RMS)

The best outcome of these classes, according to Teacher J, is when students develop their own thoughts and photographic visions with inspiration from their ‘master’. He explains that one form of proof that a student has really learned something is when she/he transcends the school environment and, for example, takes part in an external exhibition or contest: ‘If your student project remains at the level of a student project, then you’ve wasted your time’.

In contrast to the teachers at RMS, those at NPS and MSU align with established conventions in the history of photojournalism and documentary photography. Nearly all the interviewed teachers at these schools have a background as both news and documentary photographers. They are also dissatisfied with how journalism has developed, and are worried about the shrinking arenas for photography in the documentary tradition. As expressed by Teacher A at NPS:

Look at DN [large Swedish daily, author’s remark], i.e. their bigger photo jobs these days, well then you bring a person into the studio and set up a nice light and so on, and then there’s an interview. The documentary storytelling, that you follow people in their everyday life and the like, when was the last time you saw that?

However, at both NPS and MSU there is a continuing belief that what distinguishes a professional photographer from an amateur is the ability to tell a story through photographs. In the words of the head of the photo department at MSU:

… a professional photojournalist is capable of thinking in series and in projects, whereas an individual shot can be accessible to both an amateur and a professional. I’m not saying that amateurs can’t do it, but there are fields where professionals can be more comfortable.

At NPS, the teachers stress the importance of talking about pictures as a way to enhance students’ skills in visual storytelling. During the program, students are trained to analyze pictures’ content in order to make them more reflective regarding how light, composition, and the combination of pictures can be used to tell a story. They are also encouraged to live together on the island where the school is situated (quite far from any town or village), with the intention of stimulating them to talk about their photographic practice in their spare time. This competence in talking about your own pictures, according to the teachers, is also important for the entrepreneurial part of the profession. In the information folder about NPS, it is clearly stated that being a professional photographer today is the same as being a freelancer. Therefore, the student must be able to run a company and brand and sell her/his competences to potential clients — skills that are trained within the framework of the program.

Another area in which students’ judgment is trained, common to all three schools, is knowledge about the history of photography. This is understood as a necessity for both making photographs and developing competences in interpreting them. However, at NPS and RMS this is not framed as formally as it is at MSU. At MSU a huge part of the syllabus addresses the history of photography. Best described as a chronological canonical history, both Russian and international, it is understood in the same way as a liberal arts education: It teaches the student to think in a reflective, self-conscious, independent way. The basic thought is that to become a good photographer you also need a broad (high) cultural orientation. As expressed by one of the teachers with long experience as a practicing photographer in Russian news media:

I think it’s very important for photographers and photojournalists to have a powerful cultural background. For them to visit museums with good paintings, to watch good movies with great camera work, to listen to good music, to read good books. All of it enables you to take good pictures. It’s impossible to notice it visually, and no one can say that if you read three of these good books, your photos will get better. It’s impossible to measure it. However, it’s obvious. And it has an impact. (Teacher G, MSU)

Contrary to what is expressed by the teachers at NPS, the education at MSU still has high hopes for photojournalism. At the same time, its teachers express criticism of the contemporary journalistic environment. Most of the photojournalism teachers have worked, or are still working, for various media outlets. One of them, a practicing newspaper photographer and editor, says that because of the low salaries at the university compared to the media industry, he likes to think of his teaching at the department as a sort of ‘community service’, aimed at improving future photojournalism (Teacher E, MSU).

MSU is understood as a sort of laboratory for best practice, with the goal of improving future Russian photojournalism. The faculty dean understands this as an explicit goal: ‘We’re lucky to not be a part of the media business; we can set the standards and we can show the upper level.’ The journalism department’s own web platform Journalist Online and publication Journalist are mentioned as examples of practices with the goal of raising the standards. These publications are described as offering opportunities for students to work journalistically without being tied by the restraints of the media business. According to Teacher D, who teaches courses in multimedia, Journalist Online also provides opportunities for discussions about future photographic practices. And a space for discussions seems to be greatly needed. Many of the teachers at MSU are worried about the future of photojournalism: both that the earlier standards are disappearing, and that there is no new good photographic practice to replace the old way of doing photography. How the Russian media have been using photographs as a propaganda weapon in the ongoing war in Ukraine since the beginning of 2022 makes this insight truer than ever.

Framing the photographic self

This study has introduced the concept ‘photographic self’ as a way to understand the collective competences and skills three photo schools in Russia and Sweden believe are important for being able to make, interpret, and communicate through photographs. With inspiration from Daston and Galison’s study on the role of images in the history of objectivity in science, three layers have been in focus: 1) the role of the photographer as an artist; 2) the role of technology; and 3) important competences for making and interpreting photographs.³²

The material makes visible different ways of relating to today’s visual culture. One way, represented by the schools with an orientation toward photojournalism and documentary photography in Russia and Sweden, is to become better than the amateurs when it comes to artistic expression, how to handle the technology with responsibility, and how to use photographs in visual storytelling. It offers evidence of transnational understandings of what photography is and how it should be practiced professionally in journalism and documentary projects, and the differences seem to have more to do with the schools’ orientations than the fact that they belong to different cultural contexts. The Western understanding of photojournalism and the documentary tradition has also become part of how ideal photographic practices are framed in the Russian context. It is not expressed that the threats to this type of photography are found in the photographer’s inscribed intentions or the fact that all representations of reality are biased, but in the fact that the arenas are disappearing, not least in journalism. Still, there is an epistemological belief in the continuing importance of this kind of photography; that the photographer should add her/his artistic intentions to the camera’s documenting qualities.

Other ways of relating to today’s visual culture are represented by two teachers at the included Russian art school for photography. One of the teachers displays several similarities with those discussed above, working in the documentary tradition. However, one important difference is this teacher’s fear that photography today is so easily reduced to style and artistry and thereby loses its critical potential. Therefore, the photographer as an interpreter of the world should break with established photographic conventions. This concern with artistic styles is taken one step further by his fellow teacher: His ideal photographic practice is to abandon the idea of inscribed meaning in the photographic expression, use the camera’s mechanical vision without human distortions, and contextualize photographic documents in multimedia projects in order to activate and engage the viewer to perceive the world with new eyes. This teacher explicitly refers to Alexander Rodchenko, who worked with photography in the wake of the Russian Revolution in 1917 as a mechanical tool that could break with established ways of representing society. In a similar way as the Revolution created new conditions for the use of photography, this teacher understands today’s circulation of amateur photographs on social media platforms as providing a space for an opposite use of photography that breaks with established styles and conventions.

However, absent among all the teachers is a freer understanding of photography in the wake of digitization. Photography is still framed by its historically anchored indexical relation to the surrounding world and as a fixed object. Using digital technology to predict possible scenarios, for instance, is not part of the framing of the preferred way of working as a professional photographer. The development of AI images and machine vision are future challenges for photography education, but this study has shown how education programs deal with new technology based on historically rooted practices, rather than understanding technological shifts — such as the one between analogue and digital — as disruptions. The development of software for AI-generated images circulating on algorithm-driven platforms will also most likely continue to create a professional belief in historically rooted human practices for making, interpreting, and communicating through photographs. This can be understood as clinging to a historical moment of photography as a technology, but it can also be understood as a way of continuing to exploit a certain aspect of the technology (the registration of light) as a human tool whose democratic importance has not diminished in the broader use of photographies (different types of photography) in today’s social media landscapes.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies.

Notes on contributors

Patrik Åker

Patrik Åker is Associate professor in Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University, Sweden. He has written about a wide range of topics from photography, visual communication, journalism, music streaming, historical perspectives on media, to the relationships between media and spatiality. He has been a co-leader for a research project about the actual buildings for media institutions, and co-authored, as well as contributed, to a number of anthologies. He is currently heading the project “Photographic Realism in the Digital Media Age”, funded by The Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies.

Notes

1. Daston and Galison, Objectivity.

2. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye; Robins, Into the Image; and Stiegler, ‘The Discrete Image’ all discuss this as a consequence of the move from analogue to digital technology. See Cmiel and Durham Peters, Promiscuous Knowledge, for a broader perspective on a cultural disbelief in photography as a tool for neutral representations.

3. Jurgenson, The Social Photo.

4. See Ritchin, After Photography; and Ritchin, Bending the Frame.

5. Newbury, “The Field of Photographic Education,” 422.

6. Newbury, “Talking About Practice.”

7. See Gómez Cruz and Lehmuskallio, Digital Photography and Everyday Life.

8. Rubinstein, “Towards Photographic Education.”

9. Ibid., 135.

10. Cmiel and Durham Peters, Promiscuous Knowledge.

11. Rubinstein, “Towards Photographic Education,” 140. He prefers to talk about digital image instead of photography because of the technological change. However, from a historical perspective, in ‘The Camera as a Meeting Place for Decision Making’ Lehmuskallio suggests that we should talk about photographies instead of photography to avoid an essential understanding and underline its different uses.

12. See Edge, “Photography, Higher Education and the Skills Agenda.”

13. Santos Silva and Eldridge II, The Ethics of Photojournalism in the Digital Age, 78–98.

14. Lavoi, “Photojournalistic Integrity.”

15. Mäenpää and Seppänen, “Imaginary Dark Room.”

16. Werneke, “What/Which Truth?”

17. Bakulin, “Photography and Photojournalism in Russia.”

18. Vartanova, Post-Soviet Transformations of the Russian Media and Journalism; cf. Musvik, “To Read, to Look.”

19. Lindblom, Bakom Bilderna; Hassner, Bilder för Miljoner; and Tellgren, Tio Fotografer.

20. See Tagg, The Burden of Representation; Gómez Cruz and Lehmuskallio, Digital Photography and Everyday Life; Lehmuskallio, “The Camera as a Meeting Place for Decision Making;” Mitman and Wilder, Documenting the World; and Edwards, “Objects of Affect.”

21. See note 1 above.

22. Ibid., 66.

23. Ibid., 383.

24. cf. Galison, ‘The Journalist, the Scientist, and Objectivity’. When Galison compares how objectivity has been treated in science vs. journalism, he finds two points in time at which the paths cross — at the beginning of the 20^th century when ‘objectivity’ began being discussed in journalism, and today with the digital image. These historical moments emphasize an anxiety concerning how to organize information so that it remains trustworthy in the eye of the public. It entails finding ways to control subjectivity and, more recently, ‘the ethics and epistemology of digital manipulation’. (68) Surprisingly, in his historical exposé Galison does not mention journalistic images until he discusses today’s situation with digital media.

25. Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life.

26. Rubinstein et al., On the Verge of Photography, 10.

27. Mitman and Wilder, Documenting the World, 5.

28. For a discussion about objectivity in Russia and Sweden see Voronova, Gendering in Political Journalism. For a discussion about realism in the Soviet era see for example Dickerman, “Socialist Realism in the Shadow of Photography.” For a discussion about photography and art see Werneke, “What/Which Truth?” According to Werneke, photography in the Russian historical context has been clearly separated from art.

29. See note 10 above.

30. Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia. According to him there are many similarities between the Russian constructivism and the modernist art forms that developed in Germany during the 20s (straight photography can be included among them), but the revolutionary ideas were downplayed in the modernist context.

31. See note 15 above.

32. See note 1 above.