Imagine walking into work and seeing your own photography on display. At the Incubator’s holiday party in December, staff were met with a pleasant surprise: Beautiful keychains featuring photos they had taken themselves over the course of a semester.
At the end summer 2017, Incubator staff interested in learning the fundamentals of digital photography began participating in semi-monthly sessions with the guidance of Camilla Finlay and Jake Waxman. Finlay is the Multimedia Administrative Coordinator at GHELI, while Waxman is the Multimedia Design Assistant at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health's Center for Health Decision Science. While one goal of the semi-monthly sessions was to empower Incubator staff to create content for the Incubator studio, the primary aim was for staff to experiment as a group—learning new skills as well as broadening their visual perspectives.
During each informal session, Finlay and Waxman covered basic equipment and photography principles before introducing a “practical application” lesson. Lessons included going outdoors to snap photos in natural light, working indoors with objects under artificial light, and even taking portraits of fellow colleagues. The sessions were purposefully designed to be hands-on, both embracing Faculty Director Sue J. Goldie’s educational philosophy of “learning by doing” and creating a stress-free environment for visual exploration.
“We wanted everyone to be able to access new skills without too much pressure, and maybe even fall in love with photography,” explains Waxman. The photography experiments were opportunities to fail fast and learn quickly. Everyone became a beginner during these group experiments, fiddling with the settings of their cameras, crouching with the lens to get a shot, raising a hand with a question, or turning to a colleague for an opinion.
After each session, Finlay exported a small set of her colleagues’ photos for the group to review and learn from. “I’ve learned so much about my colleagues just from looking at the images they have produced during these sessions. What people focus on, the way they approach a subject, each individual point of view is wonderful to see,” says Finlay. And at the holiday party, as everyone pored over Finlay’s carefully crafted keychains with a smile, the beauty in this diversity of perspective was more than apparent.