Nathan Lyons and Visual Literacy

[Music] You. Surrey work activities needs to be part of that activity, and also welcome to just the our usual Easton museum members. We think this should be an interesting piano for everyone here, and we will have time for questions at the end from the audience. I wanted to start by sort of defining our, a little bit of Jamie. Jamie and I see a definition, our approach to visual literacy, and then we'll start asking for questions of the panelists, which will probably pick that apart to a degree. So, one of these things, several concerns was visual literacy: the ability to create meaning and gathering information from images, or to read pictures. As an artist and educator, Appliance advocated for making and interpreting photographs as a way to improve visual literacy. If you mastered those skills, he thought you would be able to understand and navigate contemporary life, which is saturated with victorial messages. He underscored the importance of photographic sequence, or the order in which photographs are seen, and pointed out that the meaning of an image could change based on what is seen before or after it, and on the viewer's own experiences and associations. Volumes encourage viewers to look at photographs slowly, carefully analyzing how details and overall composition work together to just meaning. In his both of us juxtapose images to encourage us to think through the interpretation of photographic influences to strengthen our visual literacy overall. His work reveals that the meaning of photographs is inherently unstable; their message is dependent on context and tiny. Approaching his photographs will be trying and attention to be recommended, heightens our awareness of the power and possibilities of photography. So, with that opening statement, I'd like to draw my co-curator, Island, into the conversation to introduce our panelists and start the concert. Thank you again, all of you, for being here today. With a wonderful honor to be here to introduce our panel. I just want to note before the participation of 80 Coleman and Anne Tucker was made possible today thanks to the listen visiting artist fund. We're very grateful for that time support and continuing support. So, any comments are critical to begin writing about photography, and thank you instigating when the videos place in the art world was not yet firmly established. He has published columns of the Village Voice, New York Times, the New York Observer, and written articles for art we use and our paper. Ann Tucker is curator of Meredith photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and she was a student of Nathan Lyon, his first class at the digital studies workshop. She carry them countless some of the live submission, just published numerous books, and I think we can all say that she was across continents. Kate Shaw, the current director of visual studies, he's an artist, a writer, and a publisher. And Tate also teaches English and visual studies, pursuing about work. So, to help introduce yourselves a little bit to our audience, we wanted to eat to be to kind of talk a little bit, user, about your connection to see. Can you tell us a little bit more about your connections?

Okay, I want to start. No, I want to start first of all with something that I think is really interesting, which are dialogues about not using the term visual literacy. Because visual literacy, that term immediately implies that visual is a subset of literacy of words, that we need to come up with new terminology, and there's some interesting people working on that. I want to mention three things about the workshops that since a 50th anniversary change. But I want to start first with congratulating genican Lisa on an extraordinary successful effort to present the work of a complicated man, complicated work. The first word I, I think it's important is to learn at the field. How many graduates of the workshop are here? Alright. Any of you leave the workshop without having the words, the field concept that we were not individuals, we were part a community that was not just a photo medium community, but a cultural community and a social community, and had therefore had responsibilities to that? Are one of the things that when I meet other graduates, it's one of the things we all have in common. Another one of the rich, I went digging through my files and I found the 4-H proposal that it made to Buffalo to form the visual space. We're talking, can you imagine that entire school being formed on four pages? What it is besides there, but embedded, of course, is I just want to read this: "The purpose of this outline is not to convey in specific terms the structure of a program, but rather than may the basic philosophy which justifies the need for the establishment of a program of this time." And I link his undermining of any pressure he may have felt to be specific was endemic in his approach to everything. We did not take classes on how to light a portrait. We did not learn specific things. We, we had questions that were to be questioned, and there were personal evolutions in what he expected of us. He also said that the camera was like a pencil, a basic tool, and the extensive handwriting of its potential is the force on them. And he did use verbal visual vocabulary in dealing with the complex needs of a contemporary society. So, he equated the visual and verbal in an initial statement to Buffalo. The other thing he talks about in this statement is source material, and he addressed the need for historians to utilize visual sources, non-us illustration, but as a primary source material. And I remember in graduate school in seminar, remember there were only two of us. Sunday, he would be able to lay out a picture, and somebody else would lay down a picture in response to this picture, and then he would lay down a picture in response to their vision. And being me, I questioned the practicality of having and necessary, maybe he did. We do that somebody sends us a picture and we send him another picture? It's already existing. But what he worked on it, sometimes he talked about, and what the workshop was about for him, as I understood it, and a few representative is our responsibility for understanding the meaning in pictures, that what pictures as a source of our culture had to contribute that was not in a verbal manifestation. So, those were when I try to think of the three things that I came out. Well, there is a four, but I'll just tell you this very quickly. Most of you know I like to tell stories. Sequence, I'm not going to do a lot of sequences. You all have dwelt, but one of my favorite moments later in life is the friends with photography hired me to supervise your workshop. They put together in Houston with Nathan and Ralph Gibson as the two teachers. So, I first went to Nathan Cho Nantan, who was teaching Kappa students upstairs, a few of agent Brown from the one down below, and I went. And Nathan, the students have their photographs, their portfolios, all stacked this way, and guess what he did? He spread them. Oh, wow. He started sequencing them. He said he never looked at single pictures. He wanted to understand. Now, this is a great, but I just thought those were the four things that have served me so well.

So, I actually came to middle stage workshop through Joan tonight. I wanted to see some of the ferry ride red, our suppose the object that she published through W and others. Eighty-three entities. I was small personally, but I never dated 97 ecology. And when you really think about the books comes along so efficient. A my way here, and then I have money. And I first read it's a great book. Tom students photographers between covers, and the interviews, and that people my interests. I never thought of Lions of Athens to photographs as individuals. I always thought of them in terms of the book. And basically, my head's been always around book. So, the book is just as essential to my thinking around him, probably work as well. We'll talk about this later, I guess. But the really interesting thing that I have learned from Nathan was developed out of watching you teach as a shadow teaching. And the other thing that, you know, sticks out for me is really a very simple thing about this is enticing and being pretty quiet person. And the visual verbal connection, it's interesting to just know that you so, so surprised anyone through books. The first book writings on photography that I read was photographers on photography together while I was here. And some of the first survey monographs that I saw, really for the traditional, especially for following today tional, there's a sample of those others of the monetarist, which were very important to me because it made it really at the time we're talking late 1960s, it was really not much photography to be seen in New York City in terms of gallery exhibitions and museum exhibitions. There was really nothing interesting from a critical standpoint in any of the publications in New York City photography. And so I had to move my materials elsewhere. But for example, what were in some of the collections of the museum Sun City, and those posts gave me one excellent I sense of the full field of ideas and photography at the time, much more, I would say that I would get by going, for example, to the exhibition at the department of photography that Museum of Modern Art. There's much more sense of people in process, experimentation with multiple image explorations, with with various lots of thought of experimentation, and with with just a whole range of different approaches to the medium. So, that's that seems to be the type that formed my understanding of what the limitations of Museum of Modern Art's position was on photography at the time. Was the awareness to those books, the variety practice in the field that was not being represented by the Museum of Modern Art. So, it was it was basically, I'm trying to remember when I first met Nathan. I'm gonna guess it somehow 1971, because I came up here for a seminar. And I guess the the second thing I would say is, is that there was a missed opportunity between Nathan and myself in November of 1971. This was before after, which sort of the geniuses before I Nathan. I believe I published a manifesto without the education in the New York Times to Sunday room times. And I, at my recommendation of the times, invited my appointment a concerted nautical bar for 2007. Same out as a two-page spread in the Sunday New York Times. And in all modesty, this is the highest COFA the issue of photo vegetation had ever had on the national stage. And so the response to that from the photo education sector was that you may well have anticipated under Mali. In fact, the silence was total. There was no single response to this from anyone in the field, the photo education, including Nathan and all the people in what was already a fairly robust society photographic education. So, why the field turned down that open invitation to a public dialogue? I don't know, but it did turn that down for whatever its reasons. But what that gave me to understand as a first impression, ladies, and I talk about visual literacy in the given, and this this manifesto, what that gave me to understand about Nathan, perhaps incorrectly, was that he was not, he has his colleagues in the SBU were not interested in a broad public debate over fortification. And he wanted that restricted to the small circle that they SBE represented. Photography was moving at that moment from the journalism department to our departments. And aperture has a very interesting insert of the minutes of the first meeting of SB and Oscar Bailey was in teaching to Buffalo, is quoted as getting the art department of then-existing art departments to change their curricular to include photography would be as easy as moving the cemetery.

[Music] Those are great opening statements, and there's so much to work with here. We, I wanted to be a plan to go into photography and language, but I'm really still a dream by in suggestion that why we feel the need to separate visual literacy from verbal literacy, and especially today when it seems like there are two such a degree. And so I wonder if maybe to get it out a little bit, maybe think about whether and why is our difference? What when the idea was first started to germinate, and people were like, we're talking about, you know, what, what was the circuit, the catalyst for that conversation? And in terms of 20, 1973, but but I was just a conversation with recent study neuroscience. I was a responses that you're starting to come out of in terms of neuroscientific studies of the visual verbal. I heard a great talk by a book artist in Clifton, better a few years ago. The clip, the matter, the type of photographer motor separation, you know, he's brilliant. He gives up on a farm that was developed for dyslexics, and it's essentially spatially very heavy at the bottom, so that they don't flip the words in different letters as they're reading. And through the process of developing that, a lot of, you know, science went into understanding visual response versus verbal response in the brain, and those geographies spatially being different. So, it's an spoink. You this is really interesting, perhaps, you know, empirically, we're gonna start to understand better what those responses are. And that literacy, that notion that, you know, language developed out of sound as opposed to science, but had sight as a key component in terms of reading. And there is a different sense now where people are learning visuals as perhaps first response before they learn language. So, you know, what Gutenberg took a few centuries before Thursday really started to develop mass scale, perhaps, you know, we're at that stage technologically where it will start to develop. So, I, it's fascinating that you're probably right, there is a problem and seeing it as an extension of sound. Nathan would talk about pictograph in Tibetan language, right? And he started in essence looking at those picture languages before it morphed into oral sound-based language. So, yeah, we're at an interesting time right now.

I decided another enemy of photography's is the concept that the eye is a camera. It's not. The life goes straight through to the brain. There is some fascinating research being done in his'n and trying to label a way through a 50-page medical paper, which are part of several dictionaries. My understanding, they didn't test in the Menil. He's young, where they put electromagnetic on people. They queried them extensively about their sophistication in art. When they came in the gallery, there was a blank wall for them to look at. The blank wall for them to get read of, just no sort of non-stimulation. And if I'm understanding correctly, people who are not sophisticated in our process, what they saw in a different part of the brain than people who declared themselves to be sophisticated online. Those sub to do things is I really want to have thoroughly read this paper and touch with the person who wrote it, because if I'm understanding that correctly, that means where they processed it's morphed, because we all started, but it also 20 years, 50 years of looking, standing next to people and looking at pictures. The idea that we see the same thing, it's just ridiculous. And outside of instance, when I was, many of you may know, each silence early work from the 70s, recipe had to black and white and to color photographs in a 35-millimeter camera, photo active in the same spot. This particular sanam on the ruling had black man invented standing dead center, but since she was kliklak, which was coming down clearly, people behind him, who of course, thirty-five-millimeter versus 50 wheeler me, you all get differences that she's setting up. And the man next to me said, why would they exhibit for difficult? And that's where that's where the training, that's where our responsibilities of training people to come in is to look. Maybe we should put context to the term critical literacy. Really originates determined because for me, in 1969, and John thieves, who is the coordinator of visual learning at Eastman Kodak, by teaming by Chester publishes a book called physical literacy, and the term caught on in the same way that the tournament body language caught up, where Julius fast bastardized great bird whistles, can easy kinesics research. And I don't want to, I'm not diminishing, but what keeps contributed, but but the point that that term just became the term that I used as a kind of a casual, if we didn't sit down collectively and say, oh yeah, let's say that, you know, it wasn't anything like that. It was just the term du jour, and a quarter line, and probably without it, somebody's thinking about the implications of feeling that is associate of verbal university, or even university itself. The more the more important thing I think about Nathan and his cohort, and they were doing this before the analysis book, was they were encouraging through slow, patient, careful attention to photographs, to individual pictures, to pictures in in conjunction with each other, Seidman series, series sweets, etc. Careful reading of them. No, they all not only of their of their conduct of knowing all the little contents, which goes to the example you're using, looking at everything in the picture, not simply looking at the central figure, not just looking at the yet the nominal contents, but but trying to extract from that the content, not just dealing with the other level of the picture, but even with the about the architecture and pictures in connection with each other. And that was going on before the visual literacy movement, because that there is, I think it's their duties with that test, did the EBS, but before we publish a book, a lot of that kind of exploration was going on. Mine was talking about it, that others in pages afterimage pages, aperture Hattersley was talking about his courses at RIT, etc. So, the terms of high tech that, but the fact of the matter is that that all of us here, and thought those of you who studied visual studies, were deeply immersed in that process. And I was emerged from my standpoint, not being one of you, but I, that's how I came to photographs with the young, but the assumption that there was a lot of cultural material embedded, and there was a lot of signification embedded in there, and that everything in a photograph was deliberately there on the part of the photographer, even if it had been chosen to be put there by the photographer, the department put his his or her approval to that material of the image, in effect. So, I think that that kind of reading was emerging, but that kind of reading does not lend itself, did not lend itself to the cultural relationship to photographs them, and it certainly does not lend itself to the cultural relationship to photographs now. This conversation we're having, and particularly that visual reminds me, I thought I had, I was just, it was a very good man, and it was a bunch of academics about his use of tax and his use of images, and how the the pictures had these, the photographic images had to, the texts had to correct that you have to put them, and then there were texts have deficiencies, you have to have images to correct them. And I remember thinking at the time, maybe it's not that they both have failures, but that they both have seams that they're particularly good at, and you need both of them in order to get the full understanding of what the photographer's tried to get across. And perhaps pointing to how one can say something, but say a particular idea of better, and a particular format is what, and noticing that sort of making that observation might be what the artist was trying to do. And so, in his photographing and photographs where there are words in them, a lot, or you see overed in a picture, and then the next picture, it's a different word, or it's a similar word, how I'm wondering about what you might think about this idea.

My first response is that there is an answer, a verbal answer, a pictorial answer that exists, should be universally understood, continues to exist over time, because words change meaning over time. And it's also, I think, part of the changing of ideas. You know, if there is an answer, there's a checkbox, and we don't go back to it. Changing the context, you know, seeing those pictures of Marian given Cookman is not the same as seeing them at document to five, wherever that first big revelation of the world. That's a very different context, you know. So, that's what bothers me about that discussion. And what I loved about the workshop, because we all were so different, we came from so many different backgrounds, and people, you know, Mark left still wonders why I haven't graduated in geology. It's an accepted, you know, and I can see precisely that reason to bring in somebody who looked at Iraq and looked at it very differently. Market day, how old that rock wasn't, you know? So, that's really the first response to that to that. Well, I think in terms of the Texas within its images, I thought about this a bit. I got and looked at trying to come up with the sense of that kind of spectrum to look at words that deal with straight text, all the way to straight images, and where Lions works fall in the middle, where he's embedding text within the image. And, you know, it's pretty fascinating because it's kind of in a computer in the middle, and he, there, there's signification and those in those works, but it's, it's in the, the text is usually in dialogue with other elements of the photo, in a sense, with the next photo, with the photo before. And some of them came to mind as you're talking. I was outs, we could quote the first issue about each other, you know, collapse, there are no edges, which is probably a paraphrase because editors something they didn't set out as quoted, didn't attribute date or something. But that idea, they can be an inflator in writer, someone, and, you know, bringing all those together. He said, not to you about the idea of earlier about the idea needed showing a wide spectrum of work and understanding that there was a lot of different voices. That to me is very much what he was trying to do with those texts is try to bring in all these other voices. Theologist is now almost, I don't know if is talking into that wall, but that Whitman, what would miss leaves of grass being as something of an influence, I think around the larger project interpretations. And then the other books falling in that voice of America, or that voice of many being the party that comes out, is is really, I think, where quality is trying to that other voices became. I like that idea that as a student, you're learning from each other, and that each individual is bringing their own understanding, their background, or this dream to an image. And that then you might share that with somebody else. You have maybe some works, geology knowledge, I'm sure that's like down, but but top, they are rolling in how you should make them talk photography SW was that part of where the discussions around, you know, what do you see? What you see? With you see? How that play out of this teaching? I was a kid from the deep South, still possible to me, and God knows where I was impossible to them. So, you know, the cultures were different, you know, and so plus, I was not a photographer, I was a curator. And so what I was going to do with pictures was different than their reason for being in the classes. And, you know, Nathan's whole, I mean, not that it wasn't important to me, I want to thank Nathan for a B and he said to me, in classic different way, there are only, you know, and that was, you know, who was the most precise individual, down to the mustache, you know, to to people with bright red hair. This this wonderful was an era in the group of people he put together. I take your obvious visitor. I thought about the sub workshops. I organized the second conferences that happened here, and that couple of issues of care, which became proceedings of both. But during that period, I was nervous. I was on the circuit. There was that lecture serving around the country and at the Canada for for those of us who were not teaching, most of most of the people, I certainly will not teaching full time any place. And so, so I do a lot of traveling around. And one of the things that that impressed me about the visuals, visual studies to just over all of the students, Nathan, John, the other faculty here, wasn't was the clear sense that this was working for all people, you know, this was not child's play, this was not hobby, this was not even on a certain level, but sure, you had a lot of fun. This was work. The producing photographs, that thinking about photographs, that teaching about photographs, of writing about photographs was serious work. And they were, there was a river involved. And I don't want to say that visual study was the only school in the country where that was, because it wasn't. But but it was certainly one of those places where he felt that they walked in the door for me, as an outsider to the to the to the organization, to the institution. And at the same time, it was not, it was unconstrained work, if that makes a lot of sense. There were no engines, there were no fixed answers that you were expected to learn. That it was on some level an ongoing experiment. And that was there was an exciting department to participate in, in the ways that I did.

It must have been very exciting to to be each one of you are very about our society where we are, how we got about. Are we more visual? I think one thing about the target that I've been thinking about is, you know, have the people coming out of certainly graduate schools hold the idea that photography is grounded in anything but their own imagination? It's a military. And through the wharf dirty show, I've made just wonderful friends in the photojournalism world. And the people who are still to this day, as newspapers died, dedicated to the idea that they can make pictures that can communicate the world and the issues that they are seeing to a broader public. And I think those are the dichotomies of our, you know, what is currently in the world of things made with the camera, and not to mention things made in the computer and never existing anywhere. So, I think in a way, I'm glad I'm not teaching. It was the teacher, but I'm glad I'm not teaching because I think that someone coming to you and wanting to know that it's part of the problem, sound like the target programs parent. They want to know where their kid is going to end up at the end of this program. And we shouldn't have an answer to that, but that's not what you tell the parents. If you want to lay down, but it is true of the field. I mean, these kids are really good at going to take us somewhere we don't even there might go there, and they're going to take it to a new place that they're really good. And so, you know, it's, you know, like my first published, first published essay was about people who made straight photographs and manipulated. We have it feel so clearly divided into processes, you know, there was a, you know, I think use only truly stupid exhibition of those mirrors and windows where we actually put the straight guys, John's heart, you know, but it was so simple then, but you know, that discussion was so simple, you know, and the barrier, like, aren't you actually still put in under the picture, what camera you use? So, even sometimes, even developer in the process has been a burden for photography from the very beginning, you know, this whole thing of the camera and the I together, its linking the camera and its critical contribution to the outcome has been a problem in all of our discussions of photography since. But as a result, he knows that he can swipe, but he can do all these things to interact with image, but then also there's a moving image that might follow. If you're looking at a gallery of flows, there's that one thinking since the native have that, oh, we have to look at all these things a little bit, the still, we have to look at the depth that you can find in this static thing, and you have to look at what you do when you interact with an image in the context of a bloke say, or what you do when you're dealing with a moving image. This is to all different concepts, overlap, there's subjects that can overlap, but the mediums are going to speak differently. That's essentially what I see happening more more now with objects that are technological and developing these facilities, capacities. So, you know, the more visual is he moves forward, because again, the pre-orbital propre, like it was amusing that's all you just knew obviously, like that intuitive insight, it's that there's a country oral language, creed language sense that visuals are more integrative life, that could be both great and terrible. So, you know, there's a version that we would still existing with him that's a father think about video Teresita, you know, there's a totally different conversation.

But well, I, I would want to say that I think we have to distinguish, particularly at this moment in history, as a visual culture, between visual facility and visual literacy. Because I think those are two very different things. Of what I see among particularly young people, I'm 75, so there's a lot of young people out there, but [Music] they use photographs and other kinds of visual iconography, that things that I think that they're probably love emojis, for example, as far as cultural signifiers, you know, that they use them with blinding speed. We're not watching people communicate on the subway in New York, their cell phones are walking down the street, recently communicating is faster than probably anybody on this panel could do, which is very impressive. But but what we've been talking about, whether you want to call the visual literacy reading for degree, etc., requires well, patient attention. And everything in the culture, in America, a visual culture mitigates against that, does not does not favor that, it pushes against that. It is one image after another after another. Other case, even back in the late 60s, when we were starting out, many of us, we could not possibly have imagined, you know, you may go. So, we may know how they produce liver pate from stressful. They take a booze and they stuck a funnel down his neck and they crank through that funnel more grain than this goose would normally ingest in a day, and they do this day after day after day. And this swells up the goose liver because the goose has to process that and tries to process those swells of the liver and have the biggest fatty. And that's what gives you that lovely liver from the repent. They have this benefits the farmer who raises the goose, or whatever they call the goose burger, benefit a manufacturer, and it benefits the consumer, but it does not benefit the goose. And we are the Strasberg piece of the information age, and he's not evil about at least we are to some extent aware of it because of the grounding we've had. These are people do not understand that they are stressed festivities. And so that's maybe the Challenger photo education right now is to help them understand what the consequences to them are of simply having to engage with as much visual imagery as though something has struck me. The title in pursuit of magic and took me back to many maybe Cinnabon people. Now, I'm not certain whether people understand translation of him, but from that, it's a block. It's a joke. To see that my joke, this is not a joke. In other words, objective rendering is not a joke. It needs to be taken seriously. The other translation, which is also related to the play, is the understanding that the pipe is not a, which is a direct translation for the friendship. What I'm intrigued, which is as I look at Mason's work, there is a very subtle connection to people like a Mohawk. The lineage goes back quite far. It doesn't start or stop in the early 60s, early late 2000s, 90s. That what we're looking at is the struggle to understand the relationship between original experience, objective rendering, and the implications that result from that. I'm wondering if the panel could reflect a little bit on Nathan's insight that he offers between the relationship between objective rendering and philosophical implication. Publishing the vote photographers on photography was his first statement that the tog refers were capable of philosophy, that there was not clicking, you know, it wasn't whether the clip, that there was a ground, it was an intellectual mountain to what to the evolution of their work. So, I think in the classrooms, he could really push people, but it was, you know, hard to push the public because he didn't have that much time with them, you know, so, so he did it in like something like visual. I can't imagine what the general public's response division and expression was, because the father of work was the full range conceived possible at the time. Maybe confusion was part of his strategy. I never got to ask him that question. I certainly was confused when I first saw that show, because I think gone to our history school, and I had been trained to find the best picture, right? And the best who was best at making a baroque picture, who was best at making of Impressionism picture, you know, and that show had no family systems whatsoever. It was, and there was a field of ideas, and that there was a few dumb ideas, not the table read where the so the photographer kept the journal that intention significant for law was also yes, that we got in his library, if he passed away, and it was, it's amazing how many posts on perception there were. And I was just thinking about this kind of highfalutin ideas about 20th century philosophy breaking down between the exact language studies and structuralism in phenomena, phenomenological studies, and the experience of phenomena. And I always thought trying to do both in a sense, like with the publisher background in the language background, and trying to understand that we're doing the sequence here, or we're trying to put things in order, but we're also making it open enough for your phenomena, your personal perception, your your take on what you see. And then there's the people, people you see, or do you see what you believe? That Abdi, that he brings out in which project is it returning onto this upright position through media language, but you know, that tension that he's constantly reminding you of us a viewer, do you think when you see, you see everybody that you know, really? That goes essentially, I think the limits of the world see this kind of negative sense is that in order to understand what Nathan is doing these pictures, you have to in a sense treaty educated in the way that made them wanted people to become educated to read his pictures. And that kind of more slow, patient attention to take pictures in conjunction with each other. And I think that the problem for most visitors to this show, I would guess, would be they'd only make there is a graffiti, and you make pictures of pictures, posters, you know, that is that they will deal with the other level of maidens pictures, that they will never get to the about level, because that's not part of our educational system on a broad basis. What I was calling for back in 1971, you know, right now we have that there's a media literacy movement, which basically teaches people to engage with mass media. But he plays a role that is kind of a small group and mercy to photography and teaches kids to paint pictures that my little teachers, but doesn't really teach them any critical relationship to other kinds of pictures. And in fact, the visual literacy : which doesn't really particularly focus on photography and teach the deep meaning of photographs. There's no, it's the donut hole with a lot of education ographers is that is there is no objective picture, even if you know that wasn't me, and why they needed it was something, and they made a decision. We're coming to terms with the world, which the Derek, there was no objective interpretation, right answer, objective interpretation. So, I think that we have not been good at communicating. And but I think he has to tell us.

Oh, thank you. In addition to cetera for some photography and expressed. I just wanted to take a moment to remember photography of the 20th century, which was the collection made from the Eastman House. I was trying to remember that, which for years I used as a teaching tool new in my classes. And much to my delight, every time I through the world from front back and articulated the relationship of the ideas behind the photographs expanded for me. And I have never got to the point where I thought that I really had a complete grasp, but I just opened up the field of possibilities. My name's for Andromeda, pleasure working with Jack Joseph Conant, an interesting thing was that he was paying by cornet to work at Kodak in the morning, to illiteracy research at U of R in the afternoon. That never happened today. Wasn't it? It was the debts of these debts. Sheraton, nice guy. And Junsu see was another kind of sheer destructive American education center forever. At any rate, one of the things that I got out of that eventually, my master's thesis was in photographic literacy, because I wanted to concentrate 100% of photography. And I see it as a lot like torture. You get a piece of paper, you made some marks on it, you have some ideas behind it, you test somebody else, they read it, they have some ideas about it, may not be yours, and that's okay. So, I don't feel bad about there being not being an answering, you know, for draft, because you come to it in different views. Disappointing thing at the answer. A very dark photograph of railroad tracks going off in the distance with the silver traps and everything else was black, and everybody had their ideas about it. And one of the time they gave him, and one gentleman that he was crying. They estimate said, well, my father was a conductor in the railroad, and the train would stop, pick them up, he'd go there and use the one, the lantern in the back, and did the switching, you know, that one day he never came with another woman. So, you take the person next to you, who was a retro man, or or wasn't it's totally different. So, I was, you know, bad about that. I think the mystery of this plan dice, at least you get something. It's nothing. And the big problem we have now, we've got billions of us all over the world, in is what it was forgot who said it's a photograph of what else is it? And that's the thing I worry about because my name is fighting tears, and I know David Lyons, essentially for my whole, for the private life, and for most of his life, from a social point of view, economic point of view, and the health plan is given to me in direction of how can be set up a totally program at SUNY Geneseo, which I just left after teaching there for 66 years. And I've looked at applying, believe our familiar faces, some of you who used to come in and sit down, and we would have open discussions. And I was there because my wife drive a car, and there was a driver up to one of the colleges in the neighborhood, and then I would sit in amazing Lyons's classes, and got just unbelievable feedback from the class, watching the students. In fact, it was correct, one or two of you may be responsible for me being in the collection, and it made my life, paid my social connection to other photographers. And it was something that Nathan was never ready to talk to me about was photography, and what I do. And in one particular instance, who you photographing from, essentially, we drove up the same car, we got out before the raft, and he talked to me when they had finished about how do we were in approaching the same objects, and it opened up my eyes, because I was essentially the teacher of students, and made me look into the the inner chamber of myself. When I came out of the store, look at Whataburger paintin, said something to me, and wanted to do this, and he should have stood here. And I wasn't insulted, that just was opened up way which he spoke to me to be proud to know him, and to learn from him. I think this is a little point suddenly, they discourse here to leave everybody was great, great human being for everything, everything. If you're interested in that, for sale.

[Music] Yes, thank you very much for the opportunity to celebrate Nathan's contributions to all of our lives. Follow up the one, the less gentleman's conversation, I, I found I was in the first class of the visual studies workshop. I wasn't often around the workshop. I blended them to accept late at night when I was working. But what I found most challenging in about visual literacy, and that I found that amazing does so well with these images, is the dialogue is about the framing. It's about the conversation that goes beyond the subject because of the way it's framed. So, along with sequence, the picture itself has so much more to say just by the fact of how do you put it in a frame? I've spent my whole life trying how to take a picture because there are a thousand things at play when you isolate your world in a frame. So, I think Nathan for inspiring me to attempt to get good at that, but he certainly does his body work example, my storytelling by abuse. [Applause]