The U School (A & B)

Spring 2022
Classroom Teacher: Josh Kleiman
Teaching-Artist: Tamsen Wojtanowski

The U School classes worked on two large projects that asked them to self-reflect. First, students considered who they were and who they wanted to be, as well as those things and people who were important to them within their communities. Through an Expanded Portrait project, students learned about principles of photography like background and foreground, formal versus environmental portraits, lighting, and composition and then photographed each other. While viewing their portraits, each student wrote an affirmation about themselves or an aspiration they had for themselves. Working from this statement, student combined their portraits with found images from magazines. Using subtractive and additive techniques, students created final versions of their self-portrait that visually communicated their written statement. Their second project explored favorite foods as a mechanism to gather and unite with members of a community through paper negative and cyanotype processes.