Class canceled on Thursday

I’m sorry that I cannot be with you all for our scheduled class on Thursday due to a family emergency. Stick to the assignment schedule — finish reading Palestine and start Pyongyang for class on Tuesday and work on your literacy narrative comics. Compose a true story in words and images of some sort and publish that to your site over the weekend.

Since I can’t have you sketch at the start of class on Thursday, how about you just go ahead and do one on your own? Check out this brief article and accompanying photos in the New Yorker about Colin Combs, an eighteen-year-old photographer from Dayton, Ohio who uses “expired film and cheap or disposable cameras” to create “vivid, unvarnished stills” depicting himself and his friends “just trying to make art, have fun, and not feel like idiots.” Choose one of Combs’ photographs from the article and spend 10 minutes sketching your own version of the image (like we did in class previously). Scan or photograph your image and publish it in a post. Write a very brief reflection with the sketch: what drew you to the image you choose, what did you notice about it initially? What did you notice about the photograph as you spent time sketching it? These are photographs taken with cheap equipment, quick and on the fly, not carefully staged or ‘shopped — but there is something compelling about them. After sketching the image and letting your hand and eye engage with the photo in that manner, what do you think of it, what makes it art?

I’ll do my best to reply to emails between now and the end of the week, but I’ll be driving a lot and dealing with some heavy emotional stuff, so there will likely be more lag time before a reply than you are used to from me. But if you have questions about anything, don’t hesitate to email me about it — just be patient about getting a reply, please.