Art photography as a reference in the viewing of educational spaces

Abstract

In this paper artistic photography will be presented as a methodolog­ical approach to the visual concept of education mainly in two ways: first, we propose photography as an aesthetic value in documentary information within image-based educational research; second, through a visual essay, we will pro­pose different visual compositions about four key issues for the construction of the visual school concept. Artists interested in photography have approached the school and education creating an extensive visual archive since the late 19th century. Beyond the documentary value of these images, we hypothesize that these images can be important to our intuitions and ideas about school and ed­ucation. In the work that follows, we distinguish between art photography and documentary photography, basically to point out the predominance of aesthetic information above the use of referential realism that prefer documentary photog­raphy. On the other hand, our visual discourse is structured around five photo essays, organized each one with two photographs made by the author along with two visual quotations in the history of photography. These photo-essays have been organized by contrasting the four main topics that documentary and art photography has traditionally preferred: the school environment, the students, the teachers and the interactions between them. In the following photo-essays, we propose cross-readings between these four themes. The result of these visual interference and free associations offers some visual findings of our study.