Students and teachers

Image Games

Complied by Fiona Hooton

Copies of images obtained from the Picture Australia website can be used in the classroom to enhance learning. Here are a few image games to try:

The observation game

Instructions

In the observation game students select a photograph and answer the following questions regarding the image:

  • What can you see?
  • How has the photographer composed the image in terms of shot size, camera angle, lighting?
  • What are the clues in the frame?
  • What is the focal point?
  • What might have happened before or after this image was taken?

Students are then invited to write a caption for the image.

Purpose

Firstly, this game enables students to deconstruct the choices the photographer has made while capturing the image. Secondly, the observation game allows students to observe the viewer and subject interaction. Participants also examine the roles of model and photographer in exploring the social power relations created by the camera angles used in the image. As Tony Schirato and Jen Webb state in their text, Reading the Visual, 'every act of looking and seeing is also an act of not seeing even when we are attentive.' (Schirato and Webb, 2004: 13)

The montage game

Instructions

In this game students create a narrative that connects three images, ensuring the narrative contains:

  1. A plot
  2. A narrator or point of view
  3. Characters (human or otherwise)
  4. Setting
  5. The casual relations which link events together (Schirato and Webb, 2004: 83)

Purpose

Montage and history both use comparisons and relationships to construct narratives and evoke new ideas and meanings. The first part of this activity comes from a workshop run by the Cambridge Film Consortium (2003) with the second part from Schirato and Webb's Reading the Visual.

The point of view (POV) game

Instructions

Students choose one image and describe it in the first person from the perspective of:

  • The photographer
  • The spectator or person viewing the photograph
  • The person or thing within the photograph
  • The photograph itself.

Purpose

This game is adapted from Roland Barthes's classic Camera Lucida: A Reflection on Photography and enables students to consider differing points of view involved in constructing a photograph.

As Barthes observes:

'I cannot penetrate, reach into the photograph; I can only sweep it with my gaze. Like a smooth surface the photograph is flat.' (Barthes, 1993:106)

The image stack game

Instructions

Students take a stack of photographs and sort the images into genres of their own invention ensuring their genres include binaries such as civilised/barbaric or good/evil. They then describe the process of selection, identifying what was hard to select, what was easy and what they would select differently.

Purpose

This game, again from Reading the Visual, should provoke lively debate. It should also encourage students to observe, either consciously or unconsciously, how we select, edit and frame all that we see.

As Barthes observes;

'Knowledge comes in flashes, in a moment of simultaneous illumination and blindness.'

References

Barthes, R. (1993) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Vintage.

Cambridge Film Consortium. (2003) Reading Films Inset Day: The Arts PictureHouse: Cambridge.

Schirato, T., and Webb, J. (2004) Reading the Visual. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.