Llewellyn Berry
Finding One's Voice
Posted on February 9, 2011by Llewellyn Berry
The Teaching “Voice”
I think I found my teaching “voice” around 1979 or so. I was teaching at the Lemuel Penn Career Development Center. I taught Photojournalism in the Urban Journalism Workshop in the morning and Creative Photography in the Literary Arts Program in the afternoon. We recruited our students from all of the high schools in DC Public Schools and interviewed prospective students for enrollment. Later when we arrived at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts and became the Literary and Media Arts Department, we “auditioned” our students…potatoes, potahtoes… In any case, there (Penn Center) is where I believe I found my teaching “voice”.
I didn’t know what “voice” was until I was at Ellington and all of the arts teachers talked about students finding their “voice”. It wasn’t singing, not that kind of “voice”. It was something more intrinsic. It was clearly about something you were good at and something else that was difficult (at least for me) to define. The more I contemplated it and listened and watched when the term was applied, finally, it struck me: “Voice” is from my mind, my body, my heart, my soul “and finally what life is asking of me”; that, which is giving my life purpose and meaning.” It’s that last part that provided the “aha” moment for me later in life.
So, it was Interview day at Penn Center for Literary Arts and Media. I had gone to lunch and interviews were scheduled for the afternoon. Returning from lunch, I arrived at the third floor where we had our main classes and where we conducted our interviews. The place was packed with students; I mean packed. The students had to sign up for the class they wanted. The list for my photojournalism and creative photography class had the most signatures, which was no big surprise; it very often was the most popular (lots of kids in the 70’s and early 80’s were into photography, but then I asked the kids how they heard about the program and what brought them that day and more than a few of them said, they had heard about Lew Berry. They wanted to take photography from Lew Berry.
I was flabbergasted. I guess I do sound perhaps a bit too braggadocio to tell this story now, in this format, but it truly was around that time when I began to believe that I might be a good teacher…a good photography teacher. It also helps illustrate the point of the essay.
My approach to teaching photography was to first understand that it was a skill to be learned through practice. One could read books and get the technical part, but it is the art of “seeing” and the refining of that art that ultimately determines the success of a photographer. I taught kids how to use their particular camera and told them to read the manual. I helped them understand light and time and how the two equaled an exposure. If the camera had a meter in it, I showed them that when the needle was in the middle, it indicated theoretically, “a good exposure” and that was a very good beginning point. However, “seeing” the light and where the light was touching and from that, determining the f/stop and the shutter speed was essential. Suppose the camera’s battery failed and there was no spare. Then I said, “Go shoot a roll of film”. That was it. Everything from then on was built on that simple direction: “Go shoot a roll of film” Of course next was developing that film but we took our time getting there. I tried to demystify it for them. Very often they had parents or relatives who were photographers and not to downplay the role played in their lives, I suggested that they take what the relative practiced and what I was teaching and put the two together because no two photographers went about their craft the same way. The student would soon develop his own method and protocol for shooting, developing and printing.
Throughout the years former students continue to tell me that I inspired them and I continue to do so even to this day.
That’s the teaching “voice”. It seems to be what my life or “life” in its spiritual context, was expecting of me.
I am particularly blessed to have impacted so many lives.
The Photography “Voice”
There is a wooden box that sits in my living room. I use it for the storage of my little things – mementos of my esoteric life. This morning the light from the window falls on the surface. At one end of the box, there is an orchid in a small vase. The vase casts a small shadow on the box. The orchid’s leaves are green and to some degree translucent. I can see the veins in the leaves. Some of the leaves, as they twist and turn toward the light (phototropism…thank you 7th-grade science) and so there are shadows created. The shadows and the highlights of the leaves occur naturally as the orchid grows and ambient light rests upon it.
I have pre-visualized a photograph. If I had a camera, I would capture this moment. The light will change; it will fade and the configuration of highlights and shadows will also change. Perhaps the next scene created by the next phase of ambient light will be an even more profound image to me. However, in the here and now, the light that rests upon the leaves of the orchid along with the evenly-lit surface of the box, is the photograph that occupies my visual creation at the moment.
I can remember train trips when I was much younger and looking out the window at night as the train passed through warehouse districts of small towns, I was fascinated by the single lamp over the back door of a warehouse and the triangular light it shone on the warehouse parking lot or back stairs. There must have been a million of them as the train wound its way through countless villages and towns, yet each of those scenes resonated with me as a scene of immense visual intimacy – just a simple light shining down on a virtually non-descript stairway of four steps, but they made a lasting impression on me about the profundity of simplicity.
Once, I walked into the New Orleans Café in Adams Morgan many years ago and as I moved toward a table by the window, I passed a table which just sat by itself and the simplicity of it struck me as profound…in a simplistic way. It actually shouted to me, very quietly.
New Orleans Cafe
Adams Morgan
Washington, DC
1984
Therein lies the profundity of simplicity and the persistence of “voice”.