Students in Professor Bill McDowell’s introductory photography class, ARTS-137, had just starting diving into their abstract photography assignment when UVM announced the school would be turning to remote education for the rest of the semester.

McDowell knew he had to re-think not only his assignments, but the entire semester. 

“It seemed absurd to me to try and teach a class in the way that I normally would under these circumstances,” McDowell said in a recent interview over ZOOM. “The world is so unsettled that it seemed necessary to respond to the situation.” 

McDowell, always tries to relate the students work to their own particular situation or perspective. Here was a chance to turn immediately to what the students were thinking about and experiencing. 

“I always ask students to work from an individual place or space. And I ask them to try to make work that only they can make. And that under these circumstances, I feel that that's even more important.”

So McDowell stayed with the same assignments, asking students to use COVID-19 as a frame of reference.

“Students were working in isolation either at their parents’ house or in their apartments back in Burlington. And so this was an opportunity for them to explore those same limited environments. And to see if they can look at their respective places with fresh eyes, and to explore it in a way that they would not normally explore it.”

McDowell launched the assignment by making a series of personal photographs from his home.

“I wanted to show the students a way that you could respond in an environment that you think you know so well, but that in the process, through making photographs, it opens up new ways of seeing that familiar place. So I began the class with that as a kind of an offering to the students that are in this changed world,” McDowell said. “We can make new work.”

With the assignment just completed, McDowell has come away impressed with the personal impact and quality of the work. For example, he describes one piece this way.

“There's a photograph of some cobalt blue shards of glass on the street. Because of the way that it's been photographed you could think about your world crumbling.” 

Alex Both '22 featured closeups of his computer screen.

“So this student is exploring a different world in her new sense of isolation that is both expansive and reductive at the same time. And they're beautiful photographs of the screen that evoke the inner worlds and outer worlds. They're really lovely photographs,” McDowell said.

These are photographs, McDowell says, that would not have been made in any other circumstances. For example, one of the students, Zehui Wu '22, is from China.

“And the first group of photographs, were pictures made out his dorm room window. Very, very lovely photographs. In the last photograph is from the window of his of his airplane. And they joined together beautifully because of the way that he made the photographs.”

There are there is a series of photographs that enjoins the personal space of a student's home, her parents’ home with subtle references to gloves and disinfectant, along with pictures made on the street. 

The fact that the students have gone home without access to the high quality UVM cameras they are used to is not an issue, McDowell says. 

“A camera is a camera and that it all depends on how you use it . . . And it's really not impacting the quality of the work at all in that I think the I think the most striking body of work that I've seen so far has been made with a cell phone and edited on Google.” 

And to do this work in this time, underscores the role of an artist, McDowell said.  

“The role of the artist is all the more important in that it is the artist who is able to take a step back and see the world and comment on the world and explore the world in a way that other people just don't. So it's the poet, it's the filmmaker, it's the photographer, it's the sculptor who shows us who we are and who reminds us who we are. And that doesn't just happen in in times of plenty. It's all the more important that it happens in these very tumultuous, challenging times that we're currently facing.”