Teaching Award: 

2011 Juror Statement

JUROR: Sean Kernan

Winning the Center’s Teaching Award award last year was a gift–the first of two, it turns out. The second gift has been the chance digest the wonderful ideas, energies and work of this year’s nominees. It has been an education to look at the ways various people teach this wonderful medium of photography.

And after trying to weigh qualifications and actions, I asked, Whose class would I want to take? And the answer was all of them.

Someone once pointed out that Art cannot be taught at all, so if that is true, what does a good art teacher do? I think we don’t impart to students. Instead, we help them discover their capacity and support it. In that sense good teachers are like diamond cutters, finding just the fractures where a simple tap will allow the inner work to manifest. And the best teachers understand that our job is not to make students aware of photography, but of everything.

Each of the candidates for the award understands this. Beyond that, they range widely in every possible direction…experience, age, and approach. But underlying the differences of approach and experience their work is to pass along the gift that they themselves have somehow received, the gift of one’s own opened eyes.

In the end, after an extremely demanding consideration of this extraordinary group, my top three choices include one teacher just starting out and working with high school students, one who works in a college program, and one who has taught for a long time in schools, college programs and workshops. I wasn’t trying to cover this span, it just happened.

Finally what helped me to make a choice was to envision what effect each teacher might have on me and on all of the students I have worked with. And from this point of view I settled on Kerry Skarbakka as the Teaching Award recipient, with honorable mentions for Alexis Martino and Harvey Stein.

What struck me in particular was Kerry’s understanding that a teacher is always still a student, learning from everything that happens with a class and being moved to new understandings to bring back the next time. This is the teacher’s great secret, that we get at least much out of teaching as do our students.

Kerry also grasps that students in photography can arrive with a lot of exposure to imagery of all kinds but little or no knowledge of the serious and masterful work that others have done with it. So he includes a History of Photography component in his classes that lets them see and build on the best of the past. Students, particularly at the undergraduate level, can turn up in photography classes thinking that since they can already see, the class should be rather easy. Good teachers ambush them and take them far further than they expected and further than they thought they could go, into their own lives and out into the world. As one student wrote if Kerry, “He has challenged me to go bigger and farther than I ever have before.”

There is also an academic aspect, based on students need to be able to express their intentions, results and understandings. This increasingly important part of an arts education is exercised through ongoing requirements to write about their own work, the work of other photographers, historical or otherwise, as well as other assigned readings.

Finally, there is the matter of passion and enthusiasm that can’t help but ignite any student who is at all ready to burn. Such energy in a teacher can really help a student jump past impediments of incomplete knowledge to make a work that is new and then clarify their understanding retroactively. And the illumination energizes the teacher in return.

In the end I don’t think teachers (or programs) should be measured by the number of photographers they turn out but by the greater awareness with which their students subsequently move through the world. In this light I have no doubt that students of Kerry Skarbakka have a greater consciousness after his classes.

That said, all of the applicants shared these qualities in differing measures. The fact of their nomination speaks strongly for each of them, as do their presentations of their own work and philosophies and accomplishments. I also have no doubt that this extraordinary group of applicants will, in years to come, be teaching in ways that are alive and fluid, and that is one of the things that makes them so worthy.

If I could, I would award honors to each of them. Teaching art isn’t any easier than practicing it. Whatever hard work and struggles are involved, the reward is present but immeasurable. We just somehow know it is there. And what is wonderful about the Center’s Teaching Award—the whole process of it—makes teaching achievements concrete.

So my thanks go to the Center and to the founders of this award for this further chance to consider and learn more about teaching, and to use what I learn in the future.