Legend, clockwise from top left:
Mark Ostow shooting at the Kent Athletic Field
Morning, outside one of the dorms
Student Photo (Charlie Spatz) of another student at Rock Day
Kent School from across the Housatonic River
Photo crew and student take shelter from rain during a shot
Student Photo (Mike Graae) of student production of the musical “Urinetown”
A couple of weeks ago, we had another opportunity to work with photographer Mark Ostow on a project for Kent, an excellent boarding school located in Connecticut. One of the things we were able to try with this photoshoot is an idea that Michael Stoner mentioned to me over a year ago—that we might recruit students to help visually tell the story of a school, and populate the website using student photography. It’s an idea that I kept in my back pocket until the right project came along, and that project happened to be for Kent.
I love the idea using student photos to populate the website of a school they attend because 1) it’s a truly authentic way of showing what it’s like to be at the school – from a young person’s perspective and 2) using multiple photographers supports the idea of decentralized authorship. By having multiple people add to the photographic library, the library becomes representative of multiple points of view, rather than one person’s take on what the school is. To support this idea further, Kent is going to continue to have students shoot the school each year, which means their photo library will be nice and current over the next few years.
The way we managed the shoot: we still had Mark Ostow and his team of photographers shooting professional, magazine-quality shots. Mark also led a workshop with four students who had expressed interest in shooting photography for the website. The workshop involved examining work from each student, giving them assignements, and then collecting images and reviewing them together in a critique session.
As part of this project, and before the site goes live, we’re setting up all of the professional and student images from the shoot in Adobe Bridge with intelligent recommendations for folder structure and tagging images. This method of archiving will mean that our client will be able to easily search and find images by category, year, author, subject matter, and more.