A college dream course

Well at least its a dream for me.  Seventeen years ago I began studying photography.  It turned out that I could actually take decent photographs (see mythologyandreality.blogspot.com).  My professor was amazed at what I could do with such little preparation.  Now that I've written a couple of books I think about it sometimes and wonder to myself "Renaissance Woman!" - well maybe not that much, but certainly not what I expected growing up in Rosenberg Texas in the 1950s and 1960s.

When I began my graduate program in Cultural Anthropology at Rice University I thought I would incorporate my photography into my research.  Ultimately I did that.  My two books have lots of photos of my field work.  But I hadn't found a way to fit it into college teaching, since I am not in an art department.

Thanks to the open-mindedness of University of Houston administrators I am now going to teach a course that a few years ago would have been a dream.  A photography course! with stories!  Its perfect -- because my research is about "stories" - (Mexico, Texas, the Virgin, Immigration, Crypto-Jews, Spain) -  so the students are going to take pictures and write stories about their pictures (in the style John Berger describes in Another Way of Telling).

This blog is not about ourselves, its about DREAMers, the world, and how to try and make things better.  However, I think that once in a while it is OK to do something different.  So here is a flier for my course that will be taught at the University of Houston in fall 2009.  

Photography

Fall 2009

University of Houston

World Cultures & Literatures 4396 

Visual Stories: the Local and the Global

5:30 -7:00 Tuesdays with Dr. Marie-Theresa Hernandez

An exciting new hybrid course where UH non-art majors spend the semester learning about the globalization of Houston.  Students will chose a country or region and photograph people from that area, telling stories with images and words.  They will take photos and write text and upload a computerized photographic essay that will be posted on a UH linked web site. Checkout uh.edu for more information on registering as a student at the University of Houston.* Lots of good things are happening there.

thank you to Kent PhotographyUK for letting us use this image

*UH didn't ask me to do this and is not paying me either.  As we have mentioned before, dreamacttexas is not about money.