> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://photopedagogy.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Out of Context - URL: https://photopedagogy.ghost.io/out-of-context/ - Published: 2026-09-27T06:49:50.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-30T10:11:51.000Z - Description: Remixing pictures and words with Year 12. - Author: Jon Nicholls - Tags: Pedagogy I spent last weekend rebuilding the PhotoPedagogy newsletter here on Ghost. That meant moving almost everything I'd written on Substack across, one post at a time, and choosing a photograph to sit at the top of each one. Ghost invites this approach more than Substack did. Each post leads with an invitation to "+ Add feature image". I've chosen to do this with a photograph cropped to 16:9\. Two days of that, keeping some header images and swapping others, and by Sunday evening I'd stopped thinking about the admin and started paying attention to the editorial decisions. The pairing of words and photographs. You almost never see a photograph on its own. There's a caption, a headline, a byline, a hashtag, an article, a curatorial statement, a title on the wall. Words come attached to pictures as a matter of course, and the two don't say the same thing in the same way. A photograph shows everything in its frame at once. A sentence behaves differently. Put them side by side and there's friction. That gap, between what the picture shows and what the words claim, is a pedagogical space. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-22-at-17.12.37-1.png) A screenshot of the PhotoPedagogy Remix web app This is what the [PhotoPedagogy Remix](https://fotologic.github.io/photopedagogy-remix/?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) app is for. It's a "crop" of the whole [PhotoPedagogy site](https://www.photopedagogy.com/?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io), a sampling of the images and quotations we've used in our resources. The app throws them together randomly. Photograph plus quotation, by chance. I modelled it on [The Mute Testimony](https://themutetestimony.com/?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io), a site which builds on John Szarkowski's idea that, "to quote out of context is the essence of the photographer's craft." A photographer quotes by cutting a fragment out of the flow of the world. The app does it twice, quoting the people who have tried to define photography out of their contexts too, then handing both halves to a viewer to ponder. Any relationship between them has to be made by whoever's looking. My view is that we can think with words and we can think with pictures and that these are different ways of knowing, neither reducible to the other. A lot of writing about photography doesn't trust photographs. It hurries to pin the image down, to convert it into an argument and file it away. There's the conceptual, curatorial register that shuts an image inside its own cleverness and the older art-historical one that shuts it inside a grand story of the medium. Two different cages. I prefer the exploratory writing, [David Campany](https://davidcampany.com/?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io)'s, [Teju Cole](https://www.tejucole.com/?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io)'s, that keeps meaning moving and lets a photograph stay several things at once. I decided to present Year 12 photographers with some photos and words to see what they made of these different ways of knowing. The exercise had a double aim, not easily resolved. I wanted students to encounter the radical openness of a photograph, its refusal to settle. And I also wanted them to become armed with some ideas about photography so that openness doesn't become "anything goes". Look hard, imagine hard and have something to think with while you do it. "Thinking" in school gets quietly narrowed to the analytical, to the business of arriving at answers. There's another part I want to nurture. The ability to stay curious a while longer. It's early doors for Year 12\. The group is new. They don't know each other yet, or me. I gave them random image/text pairs, screen grabbed from the app, plus a sheet of questions in two stages: first impressions, followed more informed looking. What can you see? What confuses you? What do the words mean to you? Is there a relationship? Then, afterwards, go and find out who made these things and notice whether your ideas have changed. They found it pretty hard. Some of the image/text pairs were properly arbitrary which didn't help tone down the nervousness in the room. But I hope the difficulty was useful. I don't mind a bit of discomfort in a classroom. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-21-at-08.33.32.jpeg) What I mostly saw was anxiety about getting the answer 'wrong', despite my protestations that there were no 'right' answers. And the fear wore two different costumes. Some students grabbed the nearest phrase and shut the image down too quickly. A staged figure falling out of a blue sky, next to Bill Brandt's "everything must be dared and tried," came back as "the sky's the limit," a kind of slogan that missed the jeopardy and the comedy of an upside down body in mid-air. Others reached for the exit. Faced with a challenging pairing, one student wrote "this doesn't really make me feel anything," which is honest, but is also an easy refusal. Sometimes the two costumes belonged to the same person, a few lines apart. The student who initially responded to the falling figure with "the sky's the limit" went on, in the next column, to ponder the implications of the Brandt quote. She wondered about, "how far having no rules can go until it's too much, or if there is ever 'too far' in photography." The cliché came first. The question came next. And it's a proper question, a hard one, about the possible limits of the dare Brandt is making. That second thought is what I want to try to make more room for. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-21-at-08.32.54-1.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-21-at-08.32.14.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-21-at-08.33.47.jpeg) Scattered through the sheets, usually in a single line and slightly undeveloped, were more of them. A student in front of Marco Breuer's abstract scorched orange chemigram wrote "picture of germs or weather forecast? Not clear." Honest bewilderment reaching for a frame. Another, given August Sander's two country girls from 1925, opened with "half awkward, half shy" and then found something stranger, that the girls "seem to be united in a way that's unexplainable, connected in an abnormal way." An exciting intuition. In front of a NASA photograph of a boot print on the moon, a student wrote, "The ground seems hard and solid but the footprint says otherwise." The quotation alongside it, from Tina Campt, argues that we take photographs in through touch as much as through the eye. The ones who annotated straight onto the image, arrows and questions in the margins, tended to stay a bit longer with the picture, letting it act on them before they offered a reading. That was a useful lesson for me. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-21-at-08.33.08.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-21-at-08.31.20.jpeg) A few went further. Given Boris Mikhailov's line that a photographic accident can beat a consciously constructed collage, opposite Penelope Umbrico's grid of hundreds of Flickr sunsets, one student saw the trap and stepped round it, writing that the quote "is a complete opposite to the photo, as the photograph itself is a sort of collage and definitely not accidental." He'd caught the pairing arguing with itself. Another, given Jeff Wall's staged photograph of a man crouched by a wall with milk bursting from a paper bag, fixed on the one wrong detail: "brown bags are normally for alcohol, so why's there milk?" They identified the displacement at the heart of the picture. And working through Gogol's "perfect nonsense goes on in the world," a student wrote that "what may be perceived as nonsense or chaos to someone may be something that makes sense to another person," then reached further, that "there's so much of everything that not all of it can get recognised." None of these is a finished thought. They're hunches, half-followed and then put aside, because time or confidence ran out. That's what I want to provide next week. Time to follow the hunch past the first sentence and enough nerve to do it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-21-at-08.36.49.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-21-at-08.33.17.jpeg) There were useful failures too. One student built a strong reading of a Marxist quotation, spotted the presence of a scribe and an official looking book staged inside the photograph, and then identified the author, the film theorist David Cook, as an American songwriter of the same name. The reasoning held; the checking didn't. Another useful lesson for me about the importance of verifying a Google search. There's a Gregory Halpern photograph of dark steps with one word sprayed across them, UNTIL. The app placed it opposite Susan Sontag's line that a photograph is "incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened." Until. A word that refuses to finish sitting beside a sentence about the photograph as the record of something finished. In a [review of *Exteriors*](https://photopedagogy.ghost.io/bookshelf-exteriors/), a catalogue of an exhibition at MEP about the relationship between photography and Annie Ernaux's writing, I wondered: > What can photographs do that writing can’t? What can writing do that photographs can’t? Where do they overlap, and where do they diverge? Next week I'm going to return to the activity with a slightly different emphasis. Less "what appeals to or confuses you?" and more "what questions do you still have?" We’ll swap sheets and eyes. And I might attempt to model the looking, wondering aloud in front of them at a pairing I've never seen before, so they can watch a reasonably competent adult be at sea and relatively untroubled by it. The willingness not to know, but the curiosity and confidence to want to stay with the image and the words a while longer. --- Thanks for reading PhotoPedagogy! Subscribe for free to receive new posts. [Subscribe](#/portal/signup/free) *These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.* [Buy me some film](https://buymeacoffee.com/photopedagogy?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) --- ### Update: We returned to the sheets and the random pairs of photos and quotes, for a longer look. Students swapped their pairings with each other, sending them left one place four times, until four different sets of eyes had looked hard and made a few additional notes. What else can you see? We then had another chat about what we might have learned. This bit was still tricky. There was a good deal of nervousness in the room. Only four weeks in with new identities and relationships to negotiate. And describing what you've learned is really hard. But looking through the new notes, it was obvious that the exercise had been worth it. The talk stayed hard and the nervousness didn't lift, but the written notes got noticeably richer and the swapping is probably why. Adding notes to a classmate's pairing is low cost compared to voicing tentative thoughts in a four-week-old room. One student wrote, of Nick Turpin's recumbant officer worker, "I didn't realise that the man was laying down. I thought his top half had been edited out." Another thought Alex Prager's falling body contrasted with the successful flight of the plane above. One identified Gregory Halpern's spray-painted "UNTIL" as the real subject of the photograph. There were precise observations. Berenice Abbott's abstract ripples were re-described as a "disturbance in a neat frequency, ruined by not being ideal/perfect." And there were notes about possible symbols, emotional resonances and wonderings: "Curious what the child is writing on the window." It's been a helpful reminder to me that looking hard, looking again and looking together, whilst sometimes awkward and uncomfortable, is time well spent.