The journey of visual thinking beyond passive observation into active perception
Cheshire Academy teachers are lifelong learners and experts in their fields. We asked them to share their thoughts and scholarship on vital issues in education.
Antonio Alfaiate is the photography and digital imaging educator at Cheshire Academy. His diverse teaching background includes college art history and professional education in video production for journalists. As a published author, Alfaiate’s work has appeared in books, magazines, and newspapers, mainly in Portugal, where he was a TV journalist and producer for two decades. Alfaiate became an American citizen in 2022.
By Antonio Alfaiate, Photography & Digital Imaging Teacher
Can a person be transformed through the use of a camera? Transformed by photography? I don’t mean the typical selfie, of course—I’m talking about when someone stops taking pictures and intentionally starts making photographs.
Both Karl Blossfeldt and Walter Benjamin, at different times and with slightly different approaches, discuss the same idea that for a photographer, when the shutter clicks, it should become less about capturing what is obvious or lying before you and more about seeing and trying to build something new, in the true sense of creation.
How does this manifest in the educational process, especially in learning photography?
Teaching Students to See
After years of teaching photography, I’ve come to a humbling realization: my job isn’t only teaching f-stops and focal lengths; it’s really teaching students how to see.
When new students arrive in the classroom, they are expert lookers—they’ve spent their entire lives with eyes open, after all. But seeing? That’s an entirely different skill. Looking is passive; seeing is active. Looking happens automatically; seeing requires intention. Looking is what we do while scrolling Instagram; seeing and acting intentionally is what artists do when creating something new.
My curriculum deliberately progresses from more direct experiences, such as a scavenger hunt done with a cellular phone, to the technical knowledge necessary to fully operate a semi-professional camera, to a more informed approach using guided observation and critical thinking that allows the visualization of abstract concepts.
We begin with cameras set to automatic and simple challenges: “Find something red. Photograph a repeating pattern. Capture an interesting shadow.” These aren’t necessarily artistic assignments yet—they’re visual “push-ups,” strengthening observation muscles most students didn’t know they had.
Moving from the Concrete to the Abstract
One student recently observed, “I’ve walked across campus every day for three years and never noticed the geometric patterns in the humanities building’s windows until I had to find examples of symmetry.” That’s not just a simple observation—this student was beginning to better make sense of his visual references and the world around him.
In class, we tackle composition—the visual grammar that turns random snapshots into intentional images—only after students develop this fundamental awareness. Then comes the technical concerns: aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and editing software basics. Notice the sequence: see first, compose second, master technical details third. This progression is part of a strategy. I’m not teaching them to memorize camera settings but to first identify, and then solve, visual problems.
It is also fascinating for me to observe the progress students make from concrete to abstract thinking: “Photograph a texture or a flower” becomes “Capture a concept like isolation or wealth.” This cognitive leap doesn’t just produce better photographs—it reshapes how students process the world. When teenagers can visualize abstract concepts such as “resilience” or “nostalgia,” they develop mental frameworks that extend far beyond photography. This progression from passive to active learning from concrete to abstract is described by Edgar Dale as the “cone of experience,” and effectively connects with the idea of “learning by doing” proposed by John Dewey. In photography, there’s simply no substitute for the cycle of attempting, evaluating, adjusting, thinking, and trying again.
I could lecture for hours about depth of field, or I could watch a student’s eyes widen in genuine understanding when they experiment with aperture settings and witness the background blur behind their subject—this creates lifelong learning.
Bringing It All Together
By mid-semester, we’re studying how masters of the craft have addressed similar visual challenges and transcended them throughout art. This is not because I expect my students to become the next Henri Cartier-Bresson but because understanding visual tradition gives them technical strategies and critical frameworks for evaluating visual communication. In a world where we consume thousands of images daily, this isn’t just artistic education—it’s almost survival training for navigating our media-saturated environment.
The culmination of this process ideally comes when students execute original projects expressing their unique perspectives. Watching them work independently—conceptualizing, shooting, editing, and refining with minimal guidance—I see better photographers and more complete thinkers.
When students progress from automatic settings to manual control, from assigned subjects to original concepts, from imitation to innovation, they’re not just learning photography—they’re developing the ability to transform how they see the world and express what they discover there.
If there is a magic moment in this process, it is when someone creates images that didn’t exist before—not merely recording reality but interpreting and reimagining it. That’s the singular moment when photography becomes art.
After all, in a world increasingly dominated by visual communication, teaching students not just to look but also to see truly might be the most important education we can offer and, in my experience, a critical skill for lifelong learning.
- Dale, Edgar. Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching. Dryden Press, 1946.
- Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. Critical introduction by Patricia H. Hinchey, Timely Classics in Education Series, Myers Education Press, 2018.
- Blossfeldt, Karl. Art Forms in the Plant World: 120 Full-page Photographs. Courier Corporation, 1985.
- Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated by J.A. Underwood, Penguin Books, 2008.
