When I was hired for my first teaching job, I was working across town at another high school where I completed my student teaching experience prior to receiving my masters degree in teaching. In the two years prior, I had begun to take and compile photographs of the images that largely contained environments/settings, symbols such as homes, neighborhoods, cars - objects that archived and denoted existence. I think the impetus to photograph my grandparents' home, street signs on their block, etc., were examples of a time and place, but also symbols of things which had remained in place throughout my life despite having moved two dozen times in two dozen years. I needed to manufacture my own regime of truth by creating a discourse with these photographs that accepts and made function my existence as real and true. In a way, these photos sanctioned truth: I have roots; I have cohesion. It's important that I never appear in these photos, that my positioning remains behind the camera. When I review the photo in print or on the computer screen, I relive the experience of taking it; I subsume the rememory of the gaze and reproduce the emotions of sanctity and gratefulness.
Like I had begun photographing my world before teaching, I had started photographing the world in which I taught at University HS, then across town at Technology where I would teach the following two years. When I arrived at THS and began photographing the exterior of the building, hallways, and asked my new colleagues to photograph their empty classrooms, one teacher asked with a suspicious inflection, "why?" I wanted to anticipate the dimensions of my possible classroom assignment, I replied. But, the full truth of my motivation was to archive the world I was entering. Unbeknownst to my colleagues, I was engaging in visual research methods by documenting the setting as if I were making my own personal travel brochure to flip through and psychosocially prepare myself for this new life space.
The classroom structures varied almost succinctly with the teachers' pedagogies. Some classrooms contained a traditional scene of student desks arranged in linear rows facing the chalkboard; other rooms split the rows down the center, arranged them horizontally to face each other with a large space down the vertical center of the room where the chalkboard appeared at the top. Some classrooms managed to arrange desks in arcs or concentrically. Equally notable was the placement of the teacher's desk - off to the side; in the back of the room facing the students or facing the wall; in the front of the room, centered; etc. These classroom settings, organizations, and objects compiled a menu of signifiers awaiting my hermeneutic inquiry.
When I was hired for my first teaching job, I was working across town at another high school where I completed my student teaching experience prior to receiving my masters degree in teaching. In the two years prior, I had begun to take and compile photographs of the images that largely contained environments/settings, symbols such as homes, neighborhoods, cars - objects that archived and denoted existence. I think the impetus to photograph my grandparents' home, street signs on their block, etc., were examples of a time and place, but also symbols of things which had remained in place throughout my life despite having moved two dozen times in two dozen years. I needed to manufacture my own regime of truth by creating a discourse with these photographs that accepts and made function my existence as real and true. In a way, these photos sanctioned truth: I have roots; I have cohesion. It's important that I never appear in these photos, that my positioning remains behind the camera. When I review the photo in print or on the computer screen, I relive the experience of taking it; I subsume the rememory of the gaze and reproduce the emotions of sanctity and gratefulness.
Like I had begun photographing my world before teaching, I had started photographing the world in which I taught at University HS, then across town at Technology where I would teach the following two years. When I arrived at THS and began photographing the exterior of the building, hallways, and asked my new colleagues to photograph their empty classrooms, one teacher asked with a suspicious inflection, "why?" I wanted to anticipate the dimensions of my possible classroom assignment, I replied. But, the full truth of my motivation was to archive the world I was entering. Unbeknownst to my colleagues, I was engaging in visual research methods by documenting the setting as if I were making my own personal travel brochure to flip through and psychosocially prepare myself for this new life space. 
The classroom structures varied almost succinctly with the teachers' pedagogies. Some classrooms contained a traditional scene of student desks arranged in linear rows facing the chalkboard; other rooms split the rows down the center, arranged them horizontally to face each other with a large space down the vertical center of the room where the chalkboard appeared at the top. Some classrooms managed to arrange desks in arcs or concentrically. Equally notable was the placement of the teacher's desk - off to the side; in the back of the room facing the students or facing the wall; in the front of the room, centered; etc. These classroom settings, organizations, and objects compiled a menu of signifiers awaiting my hermeneutic inquiry.
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