Sliding into Winning Compositions

Abstract

How would you like to put your photography to work in the language arts classroom and provide hours of stimulating activities to improve students' writing? This paper will present a five-step sequence in which you can learn to structure and use visual compositions to actively involve students in the composition process. Moreover, you will be stimulating and integrating the processing modes of both brain hemispheres while sparking discourse from poorly motivated or language-deficient students. A visual composition can be composed from your own existing slide or photography collection or it can be photographed from life occurrences once you sense how a visual composition guides students' thoughts and writing. A visual composition is a sequence of pictures that tells a complete story or ·infers a unified theme. Any life experience can provide subject matter for a visual story. Each aspect of the story is captured in a separate photo while the overall effect of the sequence suggests a holistic meaning. Try shooting one tree or another inanimate object from the same location through the seasons of the year. This provides a series of pictures that suggests one unified meaning such as "A tree changes its appearance through the year." At least four supporting examples, one for each season of the year, could relate to that central meaning. The idea in structuring a visual composition is not to photograph just the final act in the traditional triumphant pose such as when your son or daughter brought in their first fish. The trophy picture showing a beaming youth with the fish held high in one hand and the rod in the other could be shown last. The whole sequence of events leading up to that prize catch, the baiting of the hook, the cast line, .the struggle, the landing, etc. should also be captured on film. Once the same series of slides is projected before your student audience, they will be captivated by the step-by-step organization of your picture story. Slides are not the only way of presenting visual stories. They can also be constructed from filmstrip or picture book sources. Magazines, brochures, newspaper advertisements, cartoons and comic strips, provide excellent visual sources of structure photo stories. Publications such as Life or National Geographic are best to investigate since they provide a series of pictures relating to one theme. However, the use of slide sequences has the advantage of reaching class-size groups capitalizing on the movie-type format. Moreover, slides are easy to use in the classroom, are compact when stored, and can be rearranged to tell different types of stories. Most schools have slide projectors as part of standard equipment. Photographs or negatives that are in non-slide form can be converted to slides. Check on the procedure (and cost) at your local photography shop, or check with your High School Audio-Visual or Communications Department. They may be able to provide the service of slide conversion and mounting. One last suggestion is to review your present slide collection. You may be able to put together several complete or partial photo stories.