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Class in the Spotlight
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Darlington incorporates international perspective into photography courses
 Photo by Charlie Ribbens Bergen Hall is home base for Liz Darlington, who also has taught SCAD courses in France and Australia. By Monique Bos Published: Friday, April 13, 2007 New Zealand native Liz Darlington loves both photography and traveling, and she combined those interests during winter break, when she taught Travel Photography: The Foreign and the Familiar on the Savannah College of Art and Design off-campus program to Australia. “I worked with a travel photographer friend of mine who shoots for a lot of big travel magazines,” she said. “I put together assignments based on what travel photographers would normally present — culture, lifestyle, landscape, outdoors, architecture and food — and the students had to create a travel portfolio.” Part of the assignment was geared toward helping students understand how travel photography functions within magazines and other publications. “They also had to come up with a travel story; they had to form something that would be more editorially based,” she explained. “As a writer, you would start the story, and the photographer would have to find ways to hit the main points of the story. So they had to think in the roles of both the writer and the photographer.” The group spent a week each in Sydney and Melbourne, seeing a variety of photogenic scenes. “We visited places where they could get shots,” Darlington said. “I tried to immerse them in Australian culture.” They visited the Sydney opera house and botanical gardens, viewed wildlife and had other unique cultural experiences. “One of the highlights was the Blue Mountains, where we took a tour with an aboriginal guide,” she said. “It’s something aboriginal people have done traditionally — they call it a ‘walkabout.’ He literally takes [the group] straight up the side of the mountain and does not follow paths or anything like that. The students were clambering over rocks. It was a test of endurance but also, I think, kind of a spiritual thing.” And it was educational. “The students learned a lot about aboriginal culture, history and tradition,” she said. This was the first time a photography course was included in the Australia off-campus program. Advertising design and art history classes also were offered, and the 25 students who participated represented a variety of majors. “Blaine Hansen and Gail Burton in off-campus programs really helped us organize that trip; they were a huge help,” Darlington said. “The feedback from students has been really positive.” Before she moved to Savannah, Darlington spent several years living in the Czech Republic. At the time she was there, the free market economy was emerging, and she said it was exciting to experience that transition. “It’s one of my favorite places I’ve been,” she said. “There were great opportunities for photography and an exciting emerging art scene … Lots of foreigners were coming in and setting up enterprises, and I had the opportunity to work there.” When Darlington left the Czech Republic, it was to relocate to a place she’d always found intriguing: the American South, specifically Savannah. “I was very interested in working in America, and this was the Deep South — American Gothic,” she said. “For people outside America, I think the Deep South conjures up something — it’s been so written about in American literature, and it just seemed like a really interesting place to come and experience and live.” She knew a bit about Savannah from “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” and from a television show called “Savannah.” “It was on in New Zealand years ago, and it was all about Southern belles and the quirky lifestyle and the aristocracy here,” she recalled. “It was sort of a soap opera like ‘Dallas.’” Darlington originally joined the faculty at SCAD as part of what was then the computer art department, teaching Web and interactive design classes. She was hired for her experience in the television and new media industries, with the understanding that she would earn a Master of Fine Arts degree from SCAD, she said. She decided to enroll in the photography program because of a long-standing interest in the medium. “I’ve traveled for years, since I was about 21,” she said. “I’ve photographed all over the world.” Darlington’s arts background is fairly eclectic; she earned a Bachelor of Design degree in visual communications. “We did some photography, advertising, illustration — in New Zealand they don’t tend to specialize as much,” she explained. “It’s more interdisciplinary; you cover a little bit of lots of things.” She said that although she enjoyed photography, she didn’t initially think of it as a career option. “I was really interested in just recording what I was seeing, the life around me,” she said. “Photography for me is a means of documenting the life I’m leading at the time … It was just something I was passionate about. Before I came to SCAD, I must have taken 10,000 photographs. I’m still passionate about it; I do it all the time.” She started to teach some digital photography classes partway through her M.F.A. degree, and eventually made the transition to teaching photography full-time. “We’re very blessed in this department. I work with a great bunch of people; we often refer to each other as family,” she said. “Everyone gets on really well here and is very supportive of each other. People here really do go out of their way to help you … We get a huge amount of support from both our chair, Tom Fischer, and our dean [of the School of Communication Arts], Steve Bliss, who is also a photographer ... I couldn’t be in a better department.” Darlington primarily teaches digital photography classes, both in the brick-and-mortar environment of Bergen Hall and through SCAD e-Learning. In addition, she teaches Introduction to Photography and Developing a Personal Vision. “Those two classes are at opposite ends of the spectrum — when the students first come in and when they’re about to graduate — so I love teaching those,” she said. “I see how much they’ve grown. I find that really exciting; it’s one of the things I love most about teaching, to see what students become in three years.” Pursuing her own photography also enables her to relate well to students. “Continuing my own practice is what keeps me fresh in class,” she explained. “I see students struggling with the same issues I do, and it helps me to identify with what their issues are because I know I face them every day. I try to empathize with students when they are struggling to make a body of work ... You may spend a year making a body of work and then realize it isn’t good for anything. It’s really humbling. I think it’s important for faculty to have that understanding when you’re in the classroom.” Darlington is represented by the Krause Gallery in Atlanta, where she will participate in a two-person show in October for Atlanta Celebrates Photography month. She also has a solo show scheduled in New Zealand in June; it’s the first time she has shown work there since moving to the United States. “A lot of my work deals with the idea of memory, and a lot of it is influenced by photos I might have taken 10 or 20 years ago,” she said. “Photos are helping kind of shape how we think about our past. I see them as something that contains history, both personal history and collective history.” She is drawing on her global experiences for the new work she’s producing for the Atlanta exhibition. “The new series I’m working on is about where people congregate in their time off,” she said. “When you look at different places where people choose to go when they have free time, all over the world, it enforces the idea that one man’s heaven is another man’s hell.” One place she’s shot images for this series is the French Riviera, which she visits every summer with her partner, SCAD art history professor Jon Field, Ph.D., and his family. “We sit on the beach like sardines!” she said. In addition to her photography, Darlington frequently collaborates on projects with Field. “We try to find where our practices cross, try to find intersections between the things that we do,” she said. “The nice thing about our collaborative work is that it’s generally not photography. We often work with installation, video, projection, so it’s quite liberating to [sometimes] break away from traditional photography, as much as I love it.” Darlington and Field recently purchased an apartment in a village near SCAD-Lacoste, located in Provence, France, where they have both taught. They plan to spend summers there working on their respective and collaborative art. But eight years after moving to Savannah to teach at SCAD, Darlington said she’s still happy with both her teaching career and with her primary place of residence. “It’s absolutely beautiful — more beautiful than I thought it would be,” said Darlington. “There’s something unusual about Savannah, a quirkiness I love. You always see things that are strange or unusual here; you never get bored with it.”  |
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