For a second summer, Art of Writing held a writing workshop for rising high school seniors from local underserved communities. We partnered with UC Berkeley Destination College Advising Corps and Early Academic Outreach Program to present this program. Ryan Lackey, a PhD candidate in English and a 2023 alumnus of the Art of Writing Summer Writing Institute, led this workshop again — he wrote about his experience teaching the workshop last year, and this time he reflects more generally on what it means to teach.
Among the two-dozenish photographs, almost all of them portraits, reproduced in Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, the most striking features a Parisian schoolboy named Ernest. Made by Hungarian photographer André Kertész, the full-body portrait shows Ernest — full-moon face, soft eyes, ear-length middle-parted hair, low laced boots and gray student smock, maybe eight or nine years old — standing, left elbow on his desk.
Over his left shoulder, blurred by the shallow depth of field, sits his classmate, a girl, whose eyes become bleared and trodden — tired of reading the book open beneath her hands, one fist and one open palm — in the grain of the film. Because, to Barthes, a photograph always speaks personally, to you, to the viewer (I am the reference of every photograph, he writes) what he takes from Kertész’s photograph is not compositional or technical or even explicitly visual. Kertész’s photograph raises in him what he calls the fundamental question: why is it that I am alive here and now?
In part, Barthes angles the question towards the confusion of being particular, being sited in time: why is he, why am I, alive now, right now, rather than forty or fifty years ago, rather than in 1931 with Kertész and Ernest? But Barthes’s question also leads forwards rather than backwards, towards vocation and purpose and telos. Towards the purposes and pursuits of our living. What we want to do and want to have done. Why am I alive, now?
Kertész’s photograph became my favorite from Camera Lucida because, most simply, it is a photograph, a visual record, of teaching — or at least the space, part of the space, where teaching happened. Usually, the portraits I like best float their figures in unmarked space, as in the work of Richard Avedon, whose unmarked, uncreased white backgrounds allow his subjects, shot in high-contrast black-and-white, to leap towards you: in his photo of Katherine Hepburn, her face, especially her jaw, seems close enough to graze or even bite you. Truman Capote, arms behind his back, twists his bare chest towards you, and you believe he will at the next instant break the plane of the picture.
But in the Kertész photo everything in the background — the coats hanging in an uneven line from pegs on the back wall, the wooden desks worn to a dark mottled color, the books belonging to Ernest and the girl which I’ve just realized are not books but slates or little handheld blackboards — all these background objects, the materials of learning, invite me to inhabit the photograph, rather than, as with Avedon’s portraits, the subjects pushing out towards me. And, because this summer’s Art of Writing workshop I taught for high-school seniors will be the last time I teach for at least a few months, and maybe much longer, I found in Kertész’s photograph the same question it drew from Barthes: why am I alive, now?
Together, the objects in the Kertész photograph speak to the time of teaching. In the frame, everywhere around Ernest himself, we see not only the there and then of teaching, the historical fact of how Ernest and his classmates were taught, but also the here and now of teaching anywhere, anywhen. In Barthes’s words, This will be and this has been.
Anyone who has been in a classroom understands that few other situations of life make available such a huge range of experiences of time. Some classroom sessions feel interminable, longer than church or the last sixty seconds of an NBA game, because we cannot find space for our attention or have refused to bring it to light, because we dislike the subject or we have a party to get to or because we (like maybe everyone else too) haven’t done the reading. But when we guard the little ember of our attention and build its fire slowly, when someone asks a question that clenches the diaphragm or makes our eyes widen and strain, time doesn’t just speed up but disappears, devoured like light in a black hole (or a camera). Those two registers of time appear in the differences, I think, between Ernest’s face (not really bright or alert so much as curious) and his classmate’s. Were Kertész to return the following day, maybe they’d swap expressions: the girl alit by an urgent question, Ernest dream-blurred by thoughts of recess.
Without teaching, staring down a term and maybe a whole year of being on fellowship — which is, to be clear, a wonderful thing and such a sharp privilege it feels almost shameful — I don’t know how to answer a question like why am I alive, now. Time will not be the same. As I say constantly to people I know well, teaching feels like the only defensible way I spend my time. Writing, by contrast, seems strictly personal, not in the sense of guarded privacy but in the sense of being for me, a tracking or extension of myself.
At no moment while writing can I believe I’m doing something for someone else, something somehow generous or generally salutary. In my case at least, writing’s importance lies with its indispensability to me, the fact that, like art and beauty more widely, writing fastens me, like the bolts that attach houses to foundations, to any life I can imagine for myself.
All the time I spend writing, whether in service of academic scholarship or fiction or a letter or a review, and all the time I spend reading, which feels even more personal than the writing, becomes somehow justified — even though I dislike the whole notion of “justification,” as if you need to account for your time to some kind of surveilling authority, whether imagined as Father or Boss or God himself — by teaching. (To say nothing of my own photographic obsession, which feels even more frivolous than writing and reading, which at least constitute, as they say, “what I do.”) Put simply, teaching might not be a wholly satisfying answer to a question like why am I alive, now?, but teaching allows me to consider the question without falling immediately into despair.
Maybe it’s another flirtation with cliché to say that the reason teaching possesses that power for me is because teaching offers me the thing it tries to offer to students: thinking, which is to say an experience of deliberate, of deliberation in, time. In Camera Lucida Barthes names that deliberate experience duration and ripening, and he fears that this thinking across history, across time, has waned over the twentieth century, alongside, although not because of, the development of photography. Everything, today, writes Barthes, leads us towards being no longer able to conceive duration . . . the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatience, of everything which denies ripening. And in the absence of duration and ripening, we lose not only “life” . . . but also, sometimes — how to put it? — love.
That’s exactly it: life, love. Barthes himself seems to recognize that talking about life and love — why am I alive, now? — demand cliché, a vocabulary so outdated today, as he describes it: the Good, Justice, Unity, etc. Evident to me in my reading of Camera Lucida is the conviction that teaching and photography are both metaphysical, which to Barthes makes them means of investigating the sky, the stars, time, life, infinity, etc. Again, the etc, which not only suggests life’s tendency to outrun or overspill language but also points to the material et cetera of the photograph (the background details, the coats and desks of the classroom) and the temporal et cetera of teaching: the possibility of infinite extension, of asking another question, of carrying on the thought further, together.
As it did last summer, this most recent workshop occupied a cavernous stadium-seated auditorium on the far edge of campus. Overlapping ten-foot whiteboards and a huge automated projector system replaced the desks and slates and pegged coats of the classroom in Kertész’s photograph. No student stood in for Ernest, photographed and prepared for rediscovery, for double memorialization in an essay or book, decades later, because we mostly forgot to take pictures, and I didn’t have one of my many cameras with me anyway. Nevertheless, my workshop seemed to happen in Kertész’s photograph, in the same space of teaching. The wholeness, the aesthetic satisfaction, the click of a good photograph like Kertész’s seems continuous with the feeling, some alloy of joy and rightness and relieved dissolution, of teaching when it has gone well, when everyone, you and the students and the materials, manage to make the space of the classroom happen together.
During my workshop, there were in one sense dozens of Ernests — what a perfect name, the Wildean pun surfacing to highlight the affirmative yawp of attentive curiosity — in attendance, and many of them, after the workshop concluded, lingered to ask questions. Some of those questions were pleasantly technical, the warmth of narrow and particular interest: why did the short story we read end this way or how do you start a good essay or what exactly is an em dash. And some of those questions were phrases, iterations, of the Barthesian question: what is it like to study English and what does it mean to be a writer and how can I start a writing practice are all ways to ask why am I alive, now? And I wanted to answer, every time, for me, at least, this is why.
One more line from Barthes: he goes to a photograph, he writes, in order to learn at last what I no longer knew about myself. In the photograph we come to learn something at the same moment we realize we had lost, had forgotten, it. It follows a double motion, forward and looped, something cyclical that also possesses trajectory. What Barthes offers here is a new image of teaching: teaching, not-teaching, as image — not strictly illumination or enlightenment, but instead as development, as shadow and highlight, fixer and rinse.