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The initial workshop in France made our students question the reliability of the most often encountered form of transparency: photography. The machine invented by Niecephore Niepce in Chalon enabled him and many generations to come to capture the reflections of objects first on metal and later on transparent film, until culminating in the invention of moving pictures and digital imaging.
Photography and its relatives have since their invention influenced our perception of the world immensely. We trust in the reliability of these images, believing them to be true and are consequently also judging art according to the dogma of realism. Beautiful paintings (according to common perception) imitate reality convincingly - an idea which has eventually led to the rejection of many forms of modern art. These forms however achieve a goal much more complex since most of them question the dogma of realism and challenge our perception of reality.
Can photographs convey reality? They certainly cannot. Each photograph reveals only what it is intended to reveal. The photographer determines each step of its making and thus influences the outcome - playing with our perception of beauty by creating a particularly harmonic or disharmonic composition, choosing a certain theme or object which pleases or shocks the eye of the beholder.
Each element of photography is subject to more or less careful planning and therefore it can easily deceive as well. Yet, being aware of these facts the camera can become a wonderful tool not to show reality but to convey a subjective perception of it. So the students were faced with the task to use the techniques of the camera and digital image manipulation to show a certain view of reality. Given that this was quite a philosophical task, we decided on a more concrete topic to get the students started on their work:
In order to make them take on a different point of view their task was to show the (school) world from the perspective of a bee.