Interviewed by Carl Burkart, Director of Prior Learning Evaluation Review

This month, we spoke with Terry Boddie a faculty mentor in the School of Arts & Humanities. Terry teaches a broad range of photography and imaging courses including Issues in Contemporary Photography, History of Photography, Black Photographers 1840-Present, Documentary Photography, and Photographic Narratives, among others. His annual photography field trip through New York City, Dusk to Dawn has become popular with both students and alumni. Boddie has exhibited his work in museums and galleries national and internationally, including the Parc La Villette in Paris, Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Art Museum of the Americas. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
 

How did you get involved and photography?

Terry Boddie: I got involved in photography as part of an exchange program between high schools in the Bronx, N.Y. I finished my academic requirements early and so one of the options I had was to visit another school at the end of the school day to basically get exposed to something that wasn’t available in your home school. And so I went to another high school, John Kennedy High School, which was north of my high school, William Howard Taft, where I took photography and graphic design and basically fell in love with both. Up to this day, I teach elements of both of those visual techniques in my own courses. I use them in my own creative practice.

 

How did how did you get involved in mentoring?

Terry Boddie: My mentoring started when I started teaching college. I started teaching at the college level in 2002. I taught at several different institutions in the New York City region. I was an adjunct instructor. I would go where I was invited to, teaching foundational classes. Eventually, I landed at ESC in 2012. Even before ESC students would regularly come to me to seek my advice. As a person who was also mentored when I was in the undergraduate level, I realized the important value of mentoring and so I informally mentored students who needed advice about how to navigate the academic structure, particularly how to move from the undergraduate to the graduate level or into the professional field. At the time I had a network of friends and colleagues who were in the field, but I had also gone through the undergraduate and graduate academic programs, so I understood the structure of how to navigate that. My mentoring was both in terms of helping students assess and develop their creative language, but also pointing them in certain directions beyond the academic structure itself. So, it began before ESC and at ESC it became more formalized. I was lucky enough to have colleagues when I arrived at ESC who really gave me a sense of how the ESC mentoring culture and structure. I was able to gain an understanding of how mentoring at ESC worked.

What kind of courses do you teach at the college?

Terry Boddie: I teach a variety of courses. I teach courses that I believe allow students to grow and explore different areas, whether it's the history of photography or the practice of photography. I teach the History of Photography, but I also teach a course called Black Photographers 1840 to the present, which focuses on those individuals whose work places them firmly within the history of photography both as commercial and fine artists but were left out of the history. That course is a corrective of sorts. However when I teach History Photography those photographers show up in the history of photography proper. I also teach Photographic Narratives, which is a course that teaches students how to tell stories with photographs, whether they're thematic narratives or linear narratives, or whether the narrative might be embedded in a single photograph. We're looking at images, and I'm teaching them how to read images, how to sequence images to create a story, and at the same time, looking at other photographers and how they've done the same.

Issues in Contemporary Photography is something that I teach where I highlight a current topic in the history of photography, something relevant to the present. A year ago, I taught one that focused on crisis and tragedy, and how those issues show up in contemporary photography. What's happening right now in Ukraine and East Africa, Syria and the southern American border among other places on the globe would have shown up in that course had I been teaching it this semester. The next time I teach it, these theaters of conflict will be very relevant. In that course, we're talking about ideas regarding agency. When do you take a photograph when you're confronted by tragedy? What is the role of the photographer? Does the photographer take the photograph because it's more impactful or put the camera down and help the person in crisis? We talk about the history of how photographers were trained to act within that theater of tragedy and how photographers now are breaking the rules of how they should approach tragedy. We also talk about the trauma that photographers themselves suffer and the fact that when photographers come back from a war zone, they need to sometimes seek therapy, which was something that was never done 20 years ago. The photographer was like this soldier. That was something that was celebrated when I was learning photography, but now we realize that even soldiers are fragile and need to be repaired when they break.

Photography from Dusk to Dawn is one of my favorites. We have fun in that class. We really are making pictures at night. One of the things that I tell students is that you really just need light to take a picture whether there's a minimal amount like a match or as bright as the sun. Light is what the camera reads and records and allows the image to come forth. But the nighttime just creates all kinds of possibilities for making pictures that you do not have in the daytime. One of the highlights of that course, which I usually teach in the summer is that we do an all-night field trip. We go literally from dusk to dawn and take pictures throughout New York City. It's just an amazing experience to basically see what's possible and actually feel the energy of the city as it shifts from this really kinetic noisy place to being absolutely calm. We go from northern Manhattan at sunset, and we work our way through the city and end up in Coney Island at sunrise. We've done it for several years, and I'm looking forward to doing it again because this is just an amazing learning experience.

What projects are you working on now?

Terry Boddie: I'm working on two projects. In the first I am using images to explore the economic system of chattel slavery and how it juxtaposes with for-profit prisons. By that I mean if you think about the black body as a commodity during chattel slavery moving from one place to the next and then with the 13th amendment supposedly freed. But then you have this clause within the 13th amendment that says if you are convicted of a crime, you've surrendered your right to your own personhood. And so, within the prison system, you could be forced to perform labor and this labor commodified within the for-profit prison model. These prisons exist as publicly tradable commodities. Currently one can buy and trade the stocks of these for-profit prisons. Within the prison system themselves, their labor is being used the same way that it would have been if they were in bondage. To make the images that are part of this series I use this process called cyanotype. It was invented in 1855 and was initially used to duplicate architectural blueprints before the more mechanized way that they are now being made. These images are made with cyanotype to symbolically indicate that these systems developed from ideas, were drawn out, and then put into action. Both chattel slavery and the prison industrial complex are things that were imagined and then acted upon in much the same way you create an architectural rendering of a structure and then produce it as an actual object in space.

The other project is a different approach and hopefully a bit more hopeful. It is using the kite as a symbolic object to examine larger issues. In the Caribbean where I was born, kites are flown during Easter season. Right now, the skies are dotted with kites all over the Caribbean. I associate kites with ideas that have to do with death, resurrection, transformation. I have a project where I build a physical kite. It may change color, but right now it's a white kite because its surface allows for the marks made on it to be highly visible. When someone comes into my studio, I give them a prompt: “If you can think of one word that could be used to create a future different from the one that we have now, what would that word be?”  They are encouraged to write the word on the kite. Of course, there is the word “love”, or someone even wrote “water.” There's all kind of answers that I get written on top of the kite and once the kite is filled with the words then I will fly the kite. There is a Judeo-Christian practice of ‘lifting up the word in prayer’, and so I would be lifting those words up in flight. It is a symbolic act. Using the framework of kites when they're flown associated with this spiritual relationship between human and the divine, and then actually having these words that speak to this idea of transformation be elevated into space. The idea is to is to fly it and record it from the ground, but also hopefully have a camera on the kite itself, so there's this relationship between earth and sky from both ends, if you will.

 

If a student wants to get started in photography or other visual arts, where would you suggest that they get started?

Terry Boddie: I would suggest that they take Intro to Digital Photography because in that class, they would learn the language of photography and also the technique of photography. They could also learn that in a class like Photographic Narratives. But if you're starting out, Into to Digital Photography is a good starting point. If you're taking the course just as a gen ed, and you just want to learn visual language, Photographic Narratives is fine. The Photographic Vision is an online course that I also teach. You're able to learn your camera as well and learn some history of photography, so there’s actually a good intersection between both of those in that course. I can chart students’ progress from the beginning to the end, and they grasp both technique and some of the history of photography in that course, so the online platform is actually not a bad place to learn photography in that respect. I think the design of that course is robust enough that students actually have some substantive outcome from it in terms of their knowledge of both the practice and history of photography.

 

When students take your photography classes, what kind of equipment do they need?

Terry Boddie: It depends on the course. If you take an advanced level course, you really do need a DSLR. In the past, we were able to purchase a couple of cameras that could be loaned to students, but most students come with their own cameras. There are a lot of students who are taking the entry level classes and are really passionate enough about learning that they buy their own camera because they know that they're going to keep using it. For a class like Photographic Narratives, you could actually use your smartphone in additional to your DSLR because it's about telling stories, and those stories could be recorded with a camera like the smartphone camera. If you take Photography from Dusk to Dawn, you could use both. I tell students, if you really want to learn your camera at night then get a DSLR. If for you, it's really just about taking really dramatic images then the sensor on a smartphone is such that you could make brilliant pictures. The difference between the DSLR and the smartphone is that you would have no idea how you got those photographs with a smartphone. But with the DSLR you'll know exactly how you got those photographs because you have to photograph on manual and adjust your aperture and your shutter speed and your ISO, the exposure triangle. With the smartphone, it’s done for you through the interface. If you're taking Intro to Photography, you just have to have a DSLR. There's no other way to learn the mechanics of photography. If you're advanced, most likely you're coming with your own on camera.
 

You see view Terry Boddie’s work online at www.terryboddie.com or view some of his work in person at the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick, NJ.

Other links:
The Nexus is a podcast from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Episode 4 includes a discussion between curator Michelle Joan Wilkenson, Tara Oluwafemi and Caleb Negash of the artwork Blueprint. The link to the podcast is also below. This piece is in the collection of the National Museum of African History and Culture.

Click here to access The Nexus Podcast, Episode 4