This was the first workshop that I went to and I feel it really set a great tone for the whole conference. The presenters, Matt Birnbaum and Flo Guido (both from University of Northern Colorado), were very personable and gave the audience the right amount of information – not too much to leave you overwhelmed, and not too little to leave you questioning the validity of their presentation.

Their thesis was that photographs are valid sets of data for the field of student affairs. Photographs have been used by many scholars in anthropology and sociology to collect data, preserve information, and describe cultures. If we extend that into assessment of programs (a large part of student affairs) we can use photography to record data, evoke responses, and report results by supplementing written findings.

They did caution that photography isn’t without its biases – while a photograph (undoctored, ie. no Photoshop) may capture what was in front of the camera, it’s ultimately up to the person who frames the shot that dictates what information is captured, and ultimately what responses are provoked. One way to combat this inherent bias is to structure photography exercises to show different viewpoints. Take a social orientation event, for example, where one person who is heavily involved in the planning of the event is given and camera and another person, who is not involved with the event, is given another camera. Comparing the two sets of photographs that result from each photographers’ experience will reveal two different sets of photographs (with less bias).

After the “lecture” portion of the workshop we broke out into small group discussions about how photography could be used in our work. One of the common things that we came up with was to ask students (or whomever it applied to) to take pictures of things with a theme in mind. Collectively, the audience came up with:

  • ask students to take pictures of their “first year experience” – you’d get a sense for what students feel their experience is made up of
  • ask staff to take pictures of their colleagues’ successes – great morale booster
  • ask alumni to take pictures of, or recreate via photos, their favourite memories of campus
  • ask students to take pictures of accessibility

Safe to say, the list can go on for a long time. This really got me thinking of all the different ways I could use photography (both subtly and overtly) in my work. You could have photography as a part of a complex exercise, or be an entire exercise unto itself. Heck, they even used photography as an icebreaker when the session started (photo at the top of this post)! They asked us to take a picture of a person beside us and have them take a picture of us and then talk about the photos – I must admit, it’s really difficult trying to talk about a photo when the subject is sitting beside you looking at it too – but I thought it was absolutely great because it got strangers talking!

This session was a great motivator for me, it showed me that something I have a passion for as a hobby can be folded into my work – always good to love what you do! The workshop also brought my attention to preserving photographic data and the importance of archiving it properly and adding metadata to make the images that we collect robust sources of information. Hopefully we can make some quick gains in this area at work – student staff training is right around the corner!

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