school

When Kevin Scruggs's daughter Mackenzie started first grade 12 years ago, he decided to pull out his camera and shoot a short interview with the 6-year-old. He then did the same thing on her first day of school for the next 12 years, and this year he turned all the clips into this touching 3-minute video wishing Mackenzie a happy graduation from high school.

After 70 years of providing aspiring photographers with a formal education, Brooks Institute announced this month that it will be permanently closing its doors. The sudden closure came as a shock, especially to current students who may now face a difficult challenge in transferring their credits and salvaging their degrees elsewhere.

There's big news that's making waves in the world of photography education: the well-known photo school Brooks Institute has announced that it will be closing, ending a 70-year run.

Polaroid is teaming up with professional photographers to launch Polaroid University, an online photography education program that provides a crash course in digital picture making.

At some early point in my 4-year stint as a film student at the University of Miami, in Florida, an advisor explained I’d have to dual-major in a field outside the school of communications. This seemed a perfectly reasonable request of the school to make; after all, the advisor said, as communication students we needed something to communicate about.

Imagine assembling a portfolio of over 4,000 photographs and then being forced to make it disappear or face life-altering consequences; that's the situation sophomore Anthony Mazur is currently facing at Flower Mound High School in his Texas hometown. After discovering the love of sports photography, the Lewisville Independent School District is now claiming that Anthony’s photographs are theirs and that he has no right to use them.

Photographer Brandon Stanton's Humans of New York has become one of the most influential photo projects in the world since it launched back in November 2010. Tens of millions of people follow Stanton as he shoots portraits of people on the street and shares the images online with their stories.

Here's a great example of how powerful his photos have become: a single photo posted earlier this month has raised more than $1 million for a school in Brooklyn to help send students to college.

Photographer Zeb Andrews prefers to slow the world down when he captures a photograph. The Portland-based photographer first began shooting with a pinhole camera purely for fun, but little did he know that, within a matter of a few years his work would take him to Turkey where he would share his love of pinhole photography with Syrian child refugees.

A few weeks ago, we shared what 7 top photographers said they wished they had learned in school. Unsurprisingly, many mentioned a desire to have learned more about business and marketing. But beyond the selection of course subject, there is a more fundamental aspect of learning in the 21st century that should be addressed.

Recently, I attended a lecture by Dr. Yong Zhao, a renown researcher in education, who has espoused many progressive ideas about the education system and how it is failing us. His thoughts made me reconsider the role of school for photographers and other creatives. Here’s what you really should be learning in photo school.

Johnny Joo is a name you might recognize. Not too long ago we featured a series of images Joo captured at a ‘train graveyard’ hidden in the forests of North Carolina. This time, we’re back with some more recent urbex work of his that takes us into the ruins of an abandoned film school that was chock full of items that are doubly interesting to us as photographers.

To "raise awareness of the social and economic challenges the city of Detroit," website Detroiturbex explores and photographs abandoned buildings and places in and around the city. One of its recent projects focuses on Lewis Cass Technical High School, which had its building devastated by a major fire in 2007 (the building was subsequently demolished).

The Art Institutes, one of the nation's largest for-profit school systems where people can receive an education in photography, has come under fire. Last month, the US Department of Justice filed a massive lawsuit against the company behind the schools, Education Management Corporation, accusing it of fraudulently collecting $11 billion in government aid by recruiting low-income students for the purpose of collecting student aid money. Whistleblowers claim that students graduate loaded with debt and without the means to pay off the loans, which are then paid for with taxpayer dollars.

Newspapers are fading. News media is in a limbo of redefinition. Now we can add photojournalism to that list of defunct media, said Neil Burgess, head of London-based photo agency NB Pictures. Burgess is also the former head of Network Photographers and Magnum Photos, and twice Chairman of World Press Photo, and has spent much of his life working on social documentary photography and 25 years as a photojournalist.

In 2009, Kingston University students Samantha Harvey and Anna Brooks were trying to photograph children at a school when they were told by the headteacher that they could only photograph single child and only show the back of their head.

In response to this incident and the growing paranoia of photographing children, the duo began shooting Class Portraits, a series of photographs that puts a twist on classic school photos by having the only visible face be the teacher's.