Doesn't belong on this line? Leave it up here.
Mirror
Window
This is a table, a line of tape and two labels for thinking about photographs. Choose an axis, the line running between two opposed ideas, and arrange a set of pictures along it. It's a sister to Sequence. That tool helps you think about the order of images. This one is about where they sit on an imaginary line.
Photographs are usually talked about as though they fall into types, this kind or that kind. They rarely do. Most pictures sit somewhere between the labels, and the more carefully you look the harder they are to pin down. The thinking happens in the dragging and placing along the line, in the moment you go to set a picture down and find your hand hovering. Both John Szarkowski (Mirrors and Windows) and Abigail Solomon-Godeau (Insider/Outsider) accepted that photographs resist settled definitions. They shift and slide depending on who's doing the looking. This tool is built around that uncertainty. It's a way of looking and arguing and it will not do the deciding for you.
Pick an axis from the buttons, and its two words appear on the Post-it notes at either end of the line. A set of practice pictures is available on the table face up and without their captions, so you meet each one before you know who made it. Drag a picture along the line according to how far it leans one way or the other. You can interpret the words yourself or read about where they come from and what they might suggest. The middle is for pictures that genuinely face both ways at once. It is not a parking space for the ones you would rather not decide about. If the axis is the wrong idea for a picture altogether, and some may not want to be anywhere on the line, lift it into the space above. Click a picture to see it larger, and turn it over there to read the caption. When you are happy with the arrangement, export it as a transparent image to keep for your records. Nothing here is saved, so take what you want and then clear the table and run the same pictures against a different axis. They will not sit still, which is the whole point.
Then it's time to upload a few of your own pictures and repeat the process.
These are works by artists shown and championed by Autograph, a gallery that has spent decades celebrating photography about race, identity, representation and human rights. The axis is a way to look at and think about them. It's not the last word and you are free to judge whether a particular line does a picture an injustice. The images here are low-resolution stand-ins. To see the work properly, visit Autograph's gallery in London and look through their collection and exhibitions online.
This is a free resource, made in good faith for education. The photographs belong to the artists who made them, and they are shown here small and at low resolution so that students can learn to look closely. Nothing is for sale, and nothing here may be used commercially. If you are one of the artists, or Autograph, and would rather a picture were not shown, please say so and it will be taken down at once, with no fuss. You can reach us through PhotoPedagogy.