Teacher: Katie Hammond

Title: Seeing is Believing

Big Idea: Place and Technology

Description: The big idea for my lesson is place and also technology. In this lesson students will consider how technology influences their perspective on the world. In the past landscape painters like Fredrick Edwin Church created images that were grand and exotic. Many gathered and paid to see Church’s paintings when they were revealed. His paintings like others in the romanticism movement were about the grandeur of nature. With technology today we have access to images around the world and know a lot about different types of environments. My students will consider how they may be able to envision certain places like Antarctica, Paris, Australia, but may have never actually seen these environments with their own eyes. This is because of the digital landscapes they interact with in visual culture. Their idea of a place like Australia is a combination of images they’ve seen digitally and also making connections from their own environment.

Students will consider questions like “Can we trust the images we see and does this affect our perspective on place?” “How does having access to all these images of environments affect our culture?” For the art making activity students will create their own digital landscape. It will be a combination of places they have never seen in person but have a personal connection to. They will be able to collage these photos in any way that is cohesive.  

Potential Activities:

One potential activity is to have students consider the similarities and differences between Fredrick Edwin Church’s paintings and the digital images that are seen today. They are both seen as exotic and most likely an ideal image. Some differences are how today we have access to more images and information about the world. We also can travel greater distances so we may have seen these places ourselves or know someone who did.

Another artist that would be interesting to look at is Henri Rousseau. As a class we can consider how he painted places that he has never been to before. His only references were images from books and the plants in his own home. In a discussion we can consider the similarities and differences between Rousseau’s process and how we interpret unknown landscapes.

Students can also look at and discuss artist Doug Aiken to see ways he collaged different environmental pictures together, and how that changed the meaning.

Digital Landscapes

How I Incorporated Digital Landscape: As I considered landscape photography and visual culture I thought about how these are images of places I have never seen. That is when I realized that my knowledge of every environment that I have never witnessed is a combination of photography, video, and other forms of visual culture. Digital landscapes are very much apart of our modern culture and shape our perspective of places in the world. In my digital landscape I chose four places that I have never been to but I could envision. I chose green fields in Ireland, Antarctica, desert in Utah, and a prairie in Africa. These are all places that I have learned about in school, watched documentaries about, and have seen many images of them on the Internet. All of these images came from Google, which is a way to view digital landscapes. I decided to make a combination of pieces of these landscapes to represent the perspective on these places. What I know of these environments are images that I have had to piece together. All of these images run together because they all stem from my experiences with visual culture and not that actual environment.

Tools I Used in Photoshop: Though I thought making this image would be easy it was not. I had to make many layers and piece them together like a puzzle as I worked. I used the quick selection and rectangle tool a lot to create new layers in the image. The eraser, spot healing brush, and clone stamp came in handy when I needed to make the layers more cohesive. The Free Transform and Puppet Warp let me get the photos to the exact size and shape I needed. I used the opacity on the layers to create the faded look. I also copied and merged many layers to control how they lined up. The initial landscape images were manipulated a lot to get them to unified.