[MUSIC] Hello there, I'm Mark Sullivan and I'll

be one of the instructors of the course. Before diving into

the work on photography, I want to give you a short overview
of my own history as a photographer. It's a bit of a winding history and
as another unusual twist. Over the last 25 years of my activity
as a photographer, I've also been a professional composer, writing music and
teaching at the university. The story starts in senior
year of in high school. I borrowed my father's
Yashica DSLR film camera and started taking pictures around the St.
Louis area where I lived. That was the beginning. Here are a few of the first shots
from that year of photography. This is a scene behind the restaurant
where I worked as a dish washer and is one of the rolls of photographs
that I took when I was 17 years old. There are two other shots here,
one from the same location of a piece of farm equipment which at
the time I treated as an abstract. The other is a shot in a parking lot with
some friends of mine that I tried to put into a kind of urban pose. And then,
one final one from a few months later, which is of one of those famous
happenings in a city park. I kept on taking photographs and about six months later
I went
on a camping trip to Canada. I took one photograph, that when I took
it I thought would be quite special. But when I had the film developed and looked
at the negative it
actually didn't look so good. Lots of dark areas and
almost nothing visible. It wasn't until later,
when I saw it on a light table, that I realized what I thought
when I took the shot was right. It was something special. What I saw convinced me
that I
wanted to keep taking photographs, and now 45 years later, I still am. After
entering college,
I took photography courses for two years. I learned how to use an SLR,
a single lens reflex, the predecessor of the current DSLR. And I also learned how
to use medium and
large format cameras. I love the darkroom. Spent many nights there developing
negatives and printing. There was no Internet and
no social media for sharing. Usually, you'll have a few conversations
with other photographers and among friends and maybe,
at some point, you got an exhibition. If you worked at it,
you could get your work around, but it wasn't anywhere near as
easy as it is nowadays. I never dreamed a day it would come
when you could get your work out around the world in a few minutes. Not long after
that, I got my first
paying job as a photographer, documenting a theatre
production at my college. I was able to borrow
a medium format film camera, a twin lens reflex Rolleiflex,
a wonderful camera. And I also borrowed an upperclassman's
film camera, a Pentax SLR. At this point,
everything was still done with film. Photographing rehearsals and run throughs
of the play presented some new and strikingly different challenges
from taking shots of nature, or shots in the street or even in the studio. Just to
jump back to the present for a
moment, I'd like to show some images from that time that demonstrate
something interesting. Even in the beginning of your work, it's
possible to take meaningful photographs. For example, these two images here, were
shot in the first two years
of my work with photography. About ten years ago I scanned them and
posted them on social media. Each is now received multiple thousands
of visits and many, many comments. Many more than some of
my most recent pictures. As you develop as a photographer,
you might create works of high quality even though
you're just beginning to learn. And you'll notice, that no matter
how much experience you acquire, each image you take will not always
be a stunning distinctive success. After working for a couple of years,
I returned to the university, but this time to pursue another passion,
music. To completing two advanced degrees for
the next 30 years or so, I developed a career
as a music composer. Through all this time and even when I became a professor, I
continued taking photographs and was able to integrate studying the work of a wide
range of photographers and photography. Not only into my free time but
also into courses I thought. One, on arts relationship to society, and another an
interdisciplinary course
on the arts in the Americas. As an artist, I also took part in a wide
range of interdisciplinary projects stretching across computer science,
cybernetics, rhetoric, physics, cinema, poetry, and yes, photography. And here and
there, now and again, over
and over, I found time for photography. Another source of inspiration
during this time came from travel. During these three decades I had the
chance to make several shooting trips to various parts of Puerto Rico,
to Portugal, to England and Austria, and in the last three years, to Cuba. Travel
is a one way to inspire
the desire to photograph. Often a lack of familiarity allows
us to see with fresh eyes and notice things others ignore. Taking time to create
shooting tours
while travelling was another way for me to keep active as a photographer. Various
things happened
that little by little led me to become ever more
involved with photography. I became increasingly involved
with artists working across media, some working in several media. I worked with a
filmmaker who
is active as a photographer, I worked with a rock musician who became
a music photographer and more importantly, I've been working with young people who
went from a photography project to a film project to a music project,
without any anxiety about who they were. Whether they were a photographer,
or a filmmaker, or composer. I began to think there might be a fluid
boundary for various kinds of art ranking. I had the chance to get a film scanner
at
this point, and I spent about a year and a half digitizing the negatives I
had created over the last 25 years, which I had kept in boxes,
disorganized but mostly in good shape. The process of digitizing these negatives,
not only forced me to organize them, but it gave me a chance to look
over all that I had done. I was generally quite amazed and
determined that I should find a way to connect with the potential I saw there and
to begin a fresh to create photographs. Around this time social networking
exploded the range of contacts. Suddenly I began posting more and more. Both my
older work and my current work were getting responses
from an international audience. This dynamic began to amplify and
transform my work of and the responses I receive
from many people and many walks of life encouraged me and
inspired me and that's still happening. And now in recent years,
I'd have to chance on several occasions to teach photography
courses at the university. I enjoyed the teaching and the students
and found the title even inspired me. Seeing with fresh eyes and
a little experimentation. Another exciting project involved each
person making a photography book. The results were amazing. You will have the
chance at some point
in the future to make a book, and there may at some point be
a course that allows you to do so. In some ways even though not
as extensive or detailed, the response to images posted on social
media is like the response you get from another person who views your photographs
and tells you things about them. Each of the images here has
received more responses than I ever could have
dreamed of on social media. And that goes to show
sometimes you might be very surprised by which images
resonate with other people. Sometimes an image might resonate more
with others than it does with you. But we'll get to that later when we turn
to looking at ways to go about responding to photographs both your own and
those of others. For now,
let's say the history is up to date. [MUSIC]