Photography Lessons
The photographs from the Photography Lessons exhibition were created during a workshop for students from a Prague high school. In the photos students reconstructed scenes from photographs of very different sorts: reproductions of historic paintings and sculptures, iconic photojournalism images and also anonymous photos downloaded from the internet. Some reconstructions look like memento shots from the running around of adolescents during a long recess break. Others have better composed scenes. Gravlejs takes the photos, blows them up and hangs them in the gallery as if they were not documentaries but rather independent images that are surrounded as such by their own inappropriate aura.
- I worked as a teacher of photography at the secondary school.00:00:25.328
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- It was quite difficult to communicate with teenagers.00:00:33.702
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- So I tried out different things and I wanted to know what they´d like to do.00:00:41.188
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- They are teenagers who aren´t interested in any presentations on photography.00:00:47.439
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- When I showed them some authors,00:00:56.065
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- they were doing something else, or they were surfing on the Internet.00:00:59.431
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- I told them to choose an artwork from the Internet and to reconstruct it.00:01:04.438
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- Nobody wanted to take pictures.00:01:18.976
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- They told me that I was a teacher of photography that00:01:21.314
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- I should take pictures and that they would be directors.00:01:28.824
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- The task was similar as in advertising photography.00:01:31.584
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- Normally you get a sketch according to which you make a photo.00:01:37.777
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- They offered me to have an exhibition in the Fotograf gallery.00:01:46.702
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- I started to think what to exhibit here.00:01:49.458
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- I thought that this was actually a very nice series and I could invite my students.00:01:56.096
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- They came and they were happy.00:02:00.165
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- Mostly when you do homework at primary or secondary school....00:02:03.104
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- they think that teachers are idiots giving them useless homework.00:02:06.869
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- They have never seen their homework to be realized.00:02:17.496
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- The second part was another task; to make a school newspapers.00:02:50.781
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- Students of the 2nd and 3rd year were told to use the aesthetics from tabloids.00:03:02.557
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- Of course, they´ve known these newspapers.00:03:09.601
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- They should make parody.00:03:14.538
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- The third year was more creative, they were part of it, they wrote the texts.00:03:19.038
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- The second year copied the ready made materials.00:03:27.315
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- They prepared a report- rotten baguets at school.00:03:30.097
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- The school switches off electricity on Friday night.00:03:37.231
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- The students who come on Monday buy the rotten baguets,00:03:45.703
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- there is, for instance, picture of a boy vomiting.00:03:52.492
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- They make montages..that Kate Moss showed her breasts.00:03:58.292
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- That she doesn´t have any.00:04:04.797
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- It was a different communication.00:04:08.520
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- I am quite satisfied with the result.00:04:14.817
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- They made it even worse than it is in tabloids.00:04:18.867