"I hardly teach. It's more like a gathering of minds looking at one subject and learning from each other. I enjoy the process"
About this Quote
Fay Godwin reframes teaching as a shared act of looking. Rather than a top-down transmission of knowledge, she imagines a circle in which experience, doubt, and curiosity can move freely. The teacher becomes a host who sets the table, not a master who carves the meat. That shift in role makes a difference in what gets learned: not a set of rules to copy, but a way of paying attention together, comparing impressions, testing judgments, and refining intuition.
The language of a "gathering of minds" echoes the way photographers actually grow. Images do not emerge from instructions so much as from conversations, edits, questions, and the friction of competing readings. In a workshop or critique, one person sees the light, another the geometry, another the social context; slowly the photograph opens. Godwin, a photographer of British landscapes and their human traces, knew that looking at place is never solitary. Land is layered with memory, access, and power. Inviting multiple perspectives is not just pedagogical technique but ethical stance, countering the authority of a single gaze.
Her emphasis on enjoying the process resists the anxiety of product and perfection. Photography is iterative: contact sheets, test prints, returns to the same path in new weather. The pleasure sits in the inquiry, the small adjustments, the way a discussion can reveal that something overlooked is the heart of the frame. By releasing the pressure to perform, she makes room for risk, experiment, and the slow sharpening of sensibility.
This approach mirrors her collaborations with writers and her public conversations about landscape. She trusted that knowledge is communal and provisional, that craft deepens when it is cross-checked by other eyes. To teach, then, is to convene attention; to learn is to join the circle. Authority is redistributed, curiosity is amplified, and the work becomes a shared practice of seeing the world more clearly.
The language of a "gathering of minds" echoes the way photographers actually grow. Images do not emerge from instructions so much as from conversations, edits, questions, and the friction of competing readings. In a workshop or critique, one person sees the light, another the geometry, another the social context; slowly the photograph opens. Godwin, a photographer of British landscapes and their human traces, knew that looking at place is never solitary. Land is layered with memory, access, and power. Inviting multiple perspectives is not just pedagogical technique but ethical stance, countering the authority of a single gaze.
Her emphasis on enjoying the process resists the anxiety of product and perfection. Photography is iterative: contact sheets, test prints, returns to the same path in new weather. The pleasure sits in the inquiry, the small adjustments, the way a discussion can reveal that something overlooked is the heart of the frame. By releasing the pressure to perform, she makes room for risk, experiment, and the slow sharpening of sensibility.
This approach mirrors her collaborations with writers and her public conversations about landscape. She trusted that knowledge is communal and provisional, that craft deepens when it is cross-checked by other eyes. To teach, then, is to convene attention; to learn is to join the circle. Authority is redistributed, curiosity is amplified, and the work becomes a shared practice of seeing the world more clearly.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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