Conscious gaze for photographic intelligence

Abstract

As a teacher, I revisit what happened in the non-formal teaching-learning process of an expanded photography workshop, which was also part of a pilot program of social reintegration with vulnerable populations coming from the streets, prostitution and seclusion. The purpose is to recognize how the construction, and awareness of, the photographer’s gaze, are protagonists of a particular type of intelligence that makes photography an interesting social communication strategy. This analysis is framed in the pedagogical considerations that shaped the workshop and discusses how some specific exercises triggered the intellectual empowerment of the students, through which they developed a conscious look supported by two guiding principles: the living and organic image and the off-line image. This process also constituted an exercise of photographic intelligence, considered to be urgent in order to coexist in a world that is permanently bombarded by photographs that unite or separate us.