Tag: Images

Stock photo matters: Swings

In praise of improving stock photo libraries

Kyle 3 Comments

When I recently commended a particular online discussion tool in response to a query on the Forma Facebook Group, a friend noted “I wish it was a little prettier. But that’s the curmudgeon in me.”

I contend that you don’t have to be a curmudgeon to want learning tools to be beautiful. No less an educational authority than Maria Montessori put it this way:

“Another character of the objects is that they are attractive. Colour, brightness and harmony of form are sought after in everything which surrounds the child. Not only the sensorial material, but also the environment is so prepared that it will attract [them], as in Nature brilliant petals attract insects to drink the nectar which they conceal.

“‘Use me carefully,’ say the clean, polished tables; ‘Do not leave me idle,’ say the little brooms with their handles painted with tiny flowers; ‘Dip your little hands in here,’ say the wash basins, so clean and ready with their soap and bubbles.”

The Discovery of the Child

If you can read that bit about the broom handles without going a little watery … well, you might just need some more beauty in your life.

My work on Creative Commons Prayer has been largely motivated by the growing importance of art and music to my own spirituality. I suspect working at St. Michael’s Church has had something to do with that, but so has studying with so many gifted designers and media makers.

And the truth is, many of our educational resources, especially free ones, are drab at best, and downright alienating at worst.

Stock photo collections have been a mixed blessing in this regard. Sure, it’s easy to get photos, including free ones, that are individually gorgeous. But as many commentators have noted, together they have too often had an ugly side effect: reinforcing white supremacy by excluding the experience of people of color.

We can do better in this respect by searching for Creative Commons photos on a site like Flickr, but some projects do not lend themselves to required media attribution.

Pastor leading prayer
Photo by Haley Rivera on Unsplash

I thought about representation a lot as I was working on my Holy Eucharist Illuminated teaching cards. I didn’t do as well as I wanted to, but I think I did way better than I would have been able to even just a couple of years ago.

That’s partly because I continue to get a better handle on the limitations of my particular experience as a white, ordained man, and partly because the libraries are getting better.

Free stock photo sites like Unsplash and Pixabay are slowly getting more diverse in their racial and cultural representation. I assume that’s partly because of small-but-growing collections like Nappy (and others), which are tackling the problem more head on and whose photos I’m starting to see show up on the bigger sites.

I also think questions of representation and equity are slowly starting to loom a little larger on (white) creators’ minds. (Emphasis on slowly—see, for example, Season 7 of Gimlet’s StartUp Podcast, which chronicles both the successes and the grueling struggles of Backstage Capital founder Arlan Hamilton.)

I say all this with two explicit intentions in mind:

(1) To challenge us all to attend to the aesthetic dimensions of the work we do. I’m coming away from my most recent resource development experience more convinced than ever of this need. Beautiful learning tools and experiences help us learn better.

(2) To remind those of us likely to need reminding that with the great power of stock photo libraries and the like comes the great responsibility to be thoughtful and critical about how we select and deploy them. Our efforts to make media worthy of the best of our traditions will fall short if we don’t continually challenge ourselves to capture the full range of beauty represented in our whole human family.

Cover photo by Erik-Jan Leusink on Unsplash

Hubble telesscope image

The waning (and waxing?) of religious imagery in the West

Kyle 1 Comment

We don’t have public course blogs in my history of communication course. But this discussion board post seemed germane to the stuff I write about here.

But whereas polyglot editions of the Bible made scripture (‘the words of God’) seem more multiform, repeatable visual aids like maps and equations made nature (the works of God) seem more uniform.

I found this observation from Eisenstein to be really fascinating. I knew the familiar story of the decline in reliance on imagery in late medieval Christianity (more on that in a second), but I hadn’t considered the way that growth in reliance on imagery in the natural sciences might have been in a sort of implicit dialogue with the parallel but opposite trend within religious expression.

Charles Taylor, one of the foremost scholars of the decline of religiosity in North Atlantic cultures, argues in his tome The Secular Age that the changes taking place at this time disenchanted people’s understanding of the world (for instance, less belief in good and evil spirits duking it out in the forest or whatever). It’s not so much that science replaced religion. He argues that that’s too simplistic an account, and anyway the two disciplines ask and answer different questions. Rather, he says, a disenchanted worldview creates the conditions where the belief that there is no God is a coherent and sensible position.

I mention all this because it seems relevant to this trend of religion relying less on images (e.g., on “cathedrals … as encyclopedias in stone”) and science relying more on them. Related to Taylor’s idea of enchantment, it seems to me, is the idea of imagination. I’m all for a disenchanted worldview. I have two degrees in engineering physics. I find it challenging to engage with religious people who believe evil spirits are motivating their actions. I’m about as “disenchanted” as they come. But I do think that all of us, and maybe especially religious people, need a powerful imagination.

I think images are essential to our ability to imagine other worlds, whether those worlds are at the subatomic level, in “the heavens,” on other continents, or wherever. We especially need the ability to imagine the world around us being a better place than it is right now. We’ll never get there if we can’t.

And images can help jump start the imagination in powerful ways:
Hubble telescope image

Brain visualization

American Lobster larva

From where I sit as a religious educator, I am grateful that the Web has taken such a strong and dramatic turn toward the visual—and multimodal (a blind member of my previous church has helped me see that an over-reliance on images alone is just as problematic). I frequently use religious art, photography, video, apps, and social media in my teaching and spiritual mentoring. Other colleagues are investing significantly in multimedia resources and approaches to religious education (examples: here and here).

The Reformation media phenomena we read about this week really did change Western religious culture. I am glad that trends in media today are facilitating a major comeback for the role of images in the communities where I spend most of my time.