Understanding Photography and Photographs (March & April 2024) | Lumenvisum, Hong Kong

Workshop dates: 30 March, 2 & 6 April 2024
Venue and host: Lumenvisum, JCCAC, Hong Kong (HK)

This is a new workshop that I have developed, in response to the request from fellow practitioners and former workshop participants for a short course to introduce the different ways of understanding photography. The intention is to create a lecture-based programme with interactive components, which targets serious amateurs and young professionals who want a (very) brief introduction to the different approaches and disciplines in understanding photography. I would like to thank Lumenvisum, a non-profit in HK that focuses on the exhibition and education of photography, for hosting the first iteration of this course. The course is held in conjunction with the recurring solo exhibition, which I curate for Lumenvisum annually, featuring a practitioner related to Southeast Asia.

In its first iteration, the course unfolds in three sessions, with each session running for two hours. In designing this course, I would like to acknowledge the generosity of educator-curator Ahmad Salman, one of the founding members of PannaFoto Institute in Indonesia. PannaFoto is a non-profit that focuses on photographic education across Indonesia. In 2015, I was invited to write about its history when I was given the PowerPoint slides for the visual literacy programme that Ahmad had painstakingly created over the years. I remember the candid conversations with my peers at PannaFoto; they had organised workshops for working photographers for years, only to realise that, despite their experience, many of them did not understand why their photo editors selected an image over the rest. That realisation germinated PannaFoto’s visual literacy programme. I would like to thank Ahmad for allowing me to incorporate several slides from his PowerPoint in this new course, especially the part concerning Gestalt principles.

At the same time, I do not want this course to focus solely on the level of the photograph. I believe it is more fruitful to understand photography through the photographic encounter in which the photographer and the photographed person(s) meet at a particular time and place to create the possibility of making photographs. I am also keen to talk about the praxis of photography, which involves the photographer(s), the photographed person(s) and the user(s) of photography. The framework of the praxis foregrounds the networks and relationships that connect these three parties who are equally crucial in photography.

In the current iteration, the course introduces, very briefly, the different ways in which photography takes effect (and becomes meaningful), borrowing from visual anthropology, social history and cultural studies. In a way, the Understanding Photography and Photographs course serves as an introduction to the Writing Photography workshop that I run. There is some overlap in terms of the materials covered in both programmes.