Photography Education in Resource-Constrained Contexts: Exploring the Potential of Mushfaking

Introduction

“Teaching photography… lies in the value of growing a community of thinking, literate, and visually literate people, who aim to understand the world we live in and the imagery around us in relation to histories and contexts both local and global” (Svea Josephy, in Bogre, 2015:18).

The history and technological evolution of image making is well documented by, amongst others, Guggenheim Museum (1996), Bell, Enwezor, Zaya and Oguibe (1999), Clarke (1997), and Edwards (2006). Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the teaching of image making, where a scan of the literature that engages with the scholarship of teaching and learning in art and design within the South African context provides scant evidence of previous research with a focus on pedagogical strategies for digital photography education within a resource constrained Higher Education (HE) context. Instead, academic literature on photography in the South African context tends towards documentation of political and social tensions (Krantz, 2008; Newbury, 2009; Thomas, 2018) and ethical concerns emanating from how this documentation occurs (Hendricks & Kajiita, 2021). In the HE context, much academic writing around photography education is mostly imported from the ‘Global North’, and gravitates around photographic theory, and the advancement of photographic technology as a tool for educational enquiry. The same is true for South African HE, where there is a growing focus on photography as a teaching tool in various disciplines (Childs, 2016), or using diverse photographic techniques for research purposes (Schulze, 2007; Mitchell, Weber & Pithouse, 2009). As such, photography is mostly used as a supplement to various course objectives or research activities in diverse fields of study reinforcing knowledge and gathering evidence. However, there are very few studies that investigate the education of the photographic medium as an artistic practice (Abrahmov & Ronen, 2008). Additionally, most of the digital photographic lexis we use to talk about digital photography arises from the analogue era¹ and is not always appropriate for contemporary photographic techniques.