Grade levels:
9 - 12
Duration:
Minimum one 45-minute classroom period
About this Exploration
Can a photograph spotlight bias, unfairness, and injustice in society?
In this lesson, you will explore how photography can represent communities, cultural backgrounds, bias, injustice toward groups, stereotypes, and differences and similarities in groups. To start, you will consider the idea of dominant culture, your own culture, and other cultures that photography can express, by analyzing photographs. Following a discussion of the factors that shape culture, you'll consider how these different cultures intersect in our public and private spaces. Finally, you'll create your own photograph representing a culture. In the final reflection, you'll begin to connect culture to change through photography as a point of view for that change.
Vocabulary
Bias
A preconceived and unreasoned inclination or preference, especially one that interferes with impartiality or fairness.
Community
A network or group of people, sometimes living in a particular place, who share interests, values, characteristics, responsibilities, or physical spaces.
Cultural Appropriation
When an individual or group claims rights to the symbols, art, language, or customs of another individual or group, often without understanding, lived experience, acknowledgment, or respect for its value in the original culture.
Culture
A social system of meaning and custom, developed by a group of people to assure the group’s identity and history. The system has unspoken rules that shape values, beliefs, habits, patterns of thinking, behaviors, symbols, and styles of communication. Consider using instead: Social identity group, social group.
Discrimination
Actions stemming from conscious or unconscious prejudice, which favor and empower one group over others based on differences of race, gender, economic class, sexual orientation, physical ability, religion, language, age, national identity, and other categories.
Ethnicity
A social construct, used to group people based on shared cultural heritage and characteristics such as values, behaviors, language, political and economic interests, history, geographical base, and ancestry.
Intersectionality
An approach coined and theory developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, scholar of critical race theory, which holds that characteristics such as gender, race, class, and others must be examined in relation to each other, rather than in isolation from each other.
Justice, Injustice
In different contexts, “justice” refers to both moral correctness and fairness, and also the rule of law. By contrast, “injustice” usually describes unfairness.
Marginalize
Treatment of a person, group, or concept as insignificant or powerless; placing them outside of a group, society, or community; and enforcing prejudice through societal institutions.
Privilege
Unearned social power granted by societal institutions to members of a dominant group, based on the nature of their identities. Often invisible to those who have it.
Race
A term used to identify individuals as part of a distinct group, based on physical characteristics and heritage. Although at one time the term was purportedly based in biology, race is now understood as a social construct that is not scientifically based.
Religion
A system of beliefs, usually spiritual in nature. Often advanced in the context of a formal institution.
Restorative Justice
A theory of justice that focuses on repairing or mitigating the harm caused by a crime. As a cooperative, in-person process with all willing stakeholders, its goals for offenders include taking responsibility, understanding the harm caused, redemption, and discouraging further harm.
Stereotype
Attitudes, beliefs, or assumptions about a person or group that are oversimplified and unsupported, but may also be widespread and socially sanctioned. Stereotypes can be positive or negative.
Unconscious Bias, Implicit Bias, Hidden Bias
Negative stereotypes regarding a person or group of people, which influence individuals’ thoughts, attitudes, and actions without their conscious knowledge.
Lesson
Introduction
As we look beyond ourselves to our communities, we start to explore questions about culture, dominant culture, dominant groups, coexisting community groups, cultural identification, biases, and other markers of people and groups.
Key questions in this lesson include:
- How does dominant culture present itself in your community?
- Does the dominant culture in your community reflect the dominant culture in your country? How, if at all, do the two differ?
- How do photographers use photography to illuminate, explain, or highlight representations of community?
Set the Stage
Because We Live in the Suburbs We Don’t Eat Too Much Chinese Food, 1971, Bill Owens, gelatin silver print. The J. Paul Getty Museum, purchased in part with funds provided by the Photographs Council. © Bill Owens
Look at the photograph shown here. Or, view the image on getty.edu.
Questions for Discussion:
- What do you notice first about this image?
- Describe the subjects of the photo and their location.
- What compositional and photographic elements do you notice, and why? Include:
- Framing
- The position of the subjects
- Where this might have been taken
- Foreground and background
- Lighting
- What do you think the photographer is trying to show or explain?
- What do you think the photographer might be communicating about this culture or community? Do you think there are unintended messages in this photograph?
- The photograph is titled Because We Live in the Suburbs We Don't Eat Too Much Chinese Food. Does anything change when you know how the photographer titled it? And what do the hot dogs on their plates suggest?
- Does anything change when you know a bit more about the photographer?
- What assumptions do you draw, or what expectations do you have, about the photographer’s background and identity?
About Bill Owens
Introduced to photography as a Peace Corps volunteer, Bill Owens (born 1938) became a staff photographer for a local newspaper in an East Bay suburb of San Francisco. In 1973 he published Suburbia, a book of photographs notable for its keen observation of middle-class America and the movement of families from urban apartments to affordable new homes in city outskirts. Social critics mocked the suburbs for their apparent conformity, but Owens respected the liberation many suburbanites felt, and their determination to build better lives.
Discuss: Community and Cultural Dominance
1919, Portland, Colorado, from “María’s Great Expedition,” 1995, Christina Fernandez, gelatin silver print. The J. Paul Getty Museum. © Christina Fernandez
Look at the photograph shown here. Or, view the image on getty.edu.
Use this example to extend your exploration to the larger questions of representation and dominant culture. How might photographers use their work to share their communities, to highlight or confront stereotypes and bias, or to frame conversations about the dominant culture, or power and privilege?
Questions for Discussion:
- What do you notice first about this image? What do you think the photographer is interested in communicating about the woman in the image?
- Do you think the photographer is aiming to impart something complex about the subject?
- Bonus: Do you notice anything different or out of place with the items in the photograph?
- This photograph is part of a series by the artist, Christina Fernandez, entitled “Maria’s Great Expedition.” The series intends to represent the experience and journey of Fernandez’s great grandmother María González, who the first member of her family to migrate to the United States from Mexico. The subject of this image is the photographer, and in this photograph, as with the rest of the series, she is intended to be portraying María. With this information about the context of the photograph, does it provide a new perspective on the image? If so, how?
- What do you think the photographer is able to communicate about contemporary and historic culture by embodying her great-grandmother's experience?
- After learning more about the photographer’s practice and her photography series, does it deepen your understanding of the work?
About Christina Fernandez
Los Angeles–based photographer Christina Fernandez’s (born 1965) Mexican heritage often influences her work, along with themes of migration, immigration, labor, gender, and her relationship to her home city. In the series “María’s Great Expedition,” Fernandez photographed herself posing as her great-grandmother María González, the first member of her family to migrate to the United States from Mexico. In these staged images, she evokes the challenges immigrants to the Southwest have had to overcome – and more universally, the challenges of migration and the strength of those who undertake the journeys.
View Christina Fernandez photographs in the Getty collection.
Exercise: Communicate Point of View
Building on your ideas about cultural dominance from the preceding discussion, the next exercise is to explore your own community and cultural dominance by creating an image or tableau that communicates your ideas.
Begin by viewing the Getty Unshuttered 2.0 Framing Composition video and thinking about the concept of Point of View. [See Resources section.]
In small groups or on your own, plan your image or tableau by completing the Point of View Image Frame or Tableau Organizer. [See Resources section.] Since you will be sharing your completed image/tableau, you may wish to focus on the aspects of your community that you feel comfortable sharing.
Once you have filled out the organizer, use what you have written as a starting point to imagine, and then create your image or tableau. When you're done, share the final images or tableaux with the class. First, discuss what was and wasn't included. Then discuss what it communicates about your ideas of cultural dominance or community.
Practice: Use Point of View to Show Cultural Dominance and Community
Review the earlier exploration of cultural dominance, including photographic elements such as framing, foreground, background, scale, proportion, lighting, and position relationships. The related photography skill videos listed under Resources also provide quick skill refreshers. Think about how you will apply these skills and understandings.
Next, use framing and perspective to make a photograph of something in your community that communicates a point of view about cultural dominance or community.
Continue your practice at home and in your neighborhood, taking the opportunity outside of class to incorporate these contexts from your daily life into your practice.
Reflect
Sharing your work can feel vulnerable, so creating a safe space for sharing is important for this exercise. In small groups or with a partner, share one to three of your photographs. You may choose to speak about your intention with the photograph(s), or not. Alternatively, this exercise can be done on your own as an individual reflection.
Consider the following questions as you look at each others' photographs and think about what it was like to make them. As you discuss them with your peers, think about ways you can share positive feedback with them.
Questions for Discussion:
- What is the first thing you notice about the photograph?
- What is the photograph expressing about a particular culture or community?
- What did you discover about yourself, your community, and others, in the course of the project?
- What was challenging, and why?
- What part are you most proud of, and why?
- What would you do differently next time?
Banner Image: Untitled, Cassidy Rodriguez, 2018
