It has been such a pleasure working with my client J. over the course of these past few weeks. He always enters the classroom full of enthusiasm to get started and a welcoming grin. I've watched him struggle to find the words that he wants to use and through his frustration I can see that he genuinely wants to be here and he wants to get better. He has a very good handle on the camera and has consistently produced great images. Following the quick preview of his shots relating to Home, I'm very interested to see what he will bring to the table for next week's class. However, last week we brought OUR number 1 photos in for discussion. This is how it all played out:

This image was the one we chose to be my number one. As always, my client J picked up on the descriptive aspects of the photo fairly quickly. His first utterance was "curtain" followed by "brown". When we had asked him to describe particular elements within the photo, he had some struggle verbalizing "newspaper", but once we broke it apart into syllables he confidently pronounced the whole word. He also noticed the glasses perched upon the newspaper, to which he started pointing to his own glasses in excitement. We then prompted him to say a whole sentence, "The glasses are on top of the newspaper". I attribute J's attention to concrete and descriptive concepts as a product of his technical background (career). However, I've noticed that J has a much more difficult time finding the right words to interpret the photos we discuss in class. He was very puzzled when we introduced the idea of "dad" in association with this photo.

I, along with my peers, drew up descriptive words such as "newspaper", "glasses", and "sunlight" to describe the photo. We settled on "inviting", "dad", and "reading" as interpretive terms. J wasn't able to come up with the interpretive terms without excessive prompting, though he did understand where we were getting the words "reading" and "inviting" from. I can definitely tell that there is some dissonance when it comes to apprehending the deeper meaning behind a photo. I have observed that J tends to take in the photographs at mere aesthetic value. He finds them visually stimulating, yet I believe that he has yet to understand how it is that he can use the photography to tell HIS story.