Learner Reviews & Feedback for Seeing Through Photographs by The Museum of Modern Art

Hallo,

Great!

great

Great

Good

NIce

A

I would give this course 4 1/2 stars. The course material was very well organized and the examples provided were for the most part very topical. the weight of the peer review at the end of the course is too high. Your peers have roughly the same knowledge as you do when you submit your assignment. They are being asked to assign a value to your submission which is really coarse...as there are only 3 choices 1 a pass, 2 not quite and 3 a fail. Considering you have done all the course work and quizzes up to the end it seems quite arbitrary.

On another note I would like to suggest a project which became a book. All too often today we view photographs in every moment of our lives but we are unaware of the the face of those creators and their iconic works. MoMA's course seems a perfect opportunity to somehow introduce the subject. the book is Behind Photographs - Archiving Photographic Legends by Tim Mantoani and MarkMurphy.

BEHIND PHOTOGRAPHS: ARCHIVING PHOTOGRAPHIC LEGENDS began as the personal quest of photographer Tim Mantoani to document and preserve noted photographers together with their images. "We have come to a point in history where we are losing both photographic recording mediums and iconic photographers,” Mantoani comments. "While many people are familiar with iconic photographs, the general public has no idea of who created them. This book became a means to do that, the photographer and their photograph in one image.”

Great course. I have a few suggestions to make it even better:

Pros:

Videos on artists are just amazing, good quality and full of interesting information.

Organization of the modules is wonderful, it makes a lot of sense.

Optional readings are really interesting, it would be difficult for people like me from undeveloped countries, to get that kind of documentation from a prestigious museum.

Doing exams is a good way to refresh all you read on the module.

Expositors are well versed and interesting, kudos on that.

The slides sections are well designed and the format is wonderful to read on either a computer or a cellphone.

Cons:

Better scans, some of them were difficult to read, pdfs should be formatted to fit a single page in full screen. Its almost impossible to read from a cellphone.

Some of the multiple choice questions on the exams were just too much, all due respect, edX continuous examination works in a more efficient way.

I hope MoMA do another interesting course on photography, perhaps specific subjects like landscape and street photography, and all the interesting subjects around them. I'm really glad to have found this, congratulations and thanks for putting this together.

Carlos Mora

ritocs@gmail.com

This is a good course on photography from an important institution that will show you and teach you the several aspects and topics of photography, from document to artwork. Made of six modules, each focused on a specific aspect, it provides different media to learn from, like interviews, critics and overviews, both in video and writings. All aspects are of photography are necessarily condensed and sometimes basic but many different links and suggestion on further material is given for those who want to get deeper. If you like photography, if you want to understand it better, or even if you are just curious about this medium which is today in everybody's lives, you will hardly be disappointed by this course. The only negative aspects for me were that sometimes the material was difficult to read and that sometimes subtitles were not very good, but this latter is a problem only if you are not an English motherlanguage. Instrucions on grading and final assignment aren't so easy and well them and this is a possible improvement for the organisation.

This course has been very interesting, however I believe that the mix of genre has been somewhat limited. While I respect the artistic choices and talents of all artists, I feel that the discussions in the videos for week 6 lack substance: picking up litter, photographing it, and arranging it for installation display strikes me as neither aesthetic nor documentary photography, unless the artist's message is in documenting our 'throw-away' society and highlighting the importance of 'recycling' for the benefit of the environment. Such messages did not appear to arise in my opinion. The discussion about architectural preservation was worthwhile but not focused. The interviewer(s) concerned could have assisted by asking relevant questions of the artist(s) for the benefit of an audience with varied photographic interests. My argument here does not involve the earlier weeks relating to the history of photography and the preservation of images for future generations which were excellent.

This is an excellent course, which opens up areas of knowledge not encountered before.

Three issues to bear in mind:

1. The content does not include enough 19th Century photography, European or American. Relating concepts to the origins and development of the medium is surely vital to a thorough understanding of contemporary issues.

2. The sections of Additional Readings and Required Readings some of the links open up *pdf files with stupidly small print that more many people is too hard to read. These files should be converted to Word documents and saved with a readable print size. Otherwise it make some documents inaccessable to some learners.

3. The estimated work times for each week bear no relation to the time required to study the additional readings. 2hrs per week is more like 6hrs per week to do the course properly.

A very fine course and an interesting and stimulating learning experience. The materials were great - based as they were on the vast archival resources of MOMA's photographic department. These were deployed to provide a quality course. It was particularly interesting to be introduced to photographers and work with which I was previously unfamilar - 'Evidence' and 'Carnival Strippers' in particular spring to mind. My only quibble was with the forums - which were ok, but compared to other coursera courses seemed to lack the engagement of tutors to pose searching questions and provide quality feedback. For some reason the forums were a little flat and didn't appear to stimulate e a high level of engagement . Other than this quibble, though, a hugely enjoyable and worthwhile course. Thank You!

I enrolled the course expecting a little more vision on "how to read" a photograph, a composition, although thanks to the Curator I now understood that the context (time, environment, history, …) is important to that purpose.

I appreciated the competence with which she treated each subject and the interesting perspective given to the various modules. It gave me a new viewpoint in what photography really is.

Good videos and interviews made it easier to understand.

Some readings from the required and additional resources were difficult because of the concepts.

I personally found some topics (module 5 and 6) a bit abstract and difficult to follow, but I put myself into it to expand my knowledge and open my mind.

I love this course. It definitely took some time to get into the groove of taking an online course but it was great and very insightful and meaningful to my career at an editorial stylist who works with photographers every day and someone who also takes pictures themselves and working hard to improve my skills as a photographer. The only reason that I wouldn't give this course or the other course I am taking 5 stars is because I think once you take the quiz at the end of every week the correct answers should be shown to the learner so you can see what the you answered (the incorrect answer) and see what it should have been. Thank you MoMA

As a photography professional but not a fine art student, I found this course valuable in understanding the evolution of photography from its role in historic image capture to become a form of social observation and artistic interpretation and statement. Understanding the evolution of the photograph has made me more aware of what artists working in the photographic medium are trying to represent through their works.

The course is not technical. It does not teach how to compose or develop a photograph. Rather, it is a lesson on the history of photography and using photography creatively through alternative and creative interpretation.

The course is great! Very interesting contents.

Just a little suggestion: colud you make a little more interactive content, to make the learning experience even more exciting. For instance, the linking between the artists references and the museum collections while you are reading an essay, or maybe a map in which you can locate the artists´countries or the photographs locations. Even a timeline would be great, just to contextualize the different artists with some others or with other fine arts or historical events.

Thanks for your work. It was really worth the time!

Really enjoyed the videos and interviews. It helps you see photographs in a more artistic, deep way. However, I feel the course could be way more connected to the recent times: how people see photography now, how social media distorces our view of the world, how diverse the photography world has become since cameras become cheaper... so much potential to be explored!

Another criticism I have is that I wasn't motivated to read most of the suggested articles, some were very painful to read.

Overall it's a good course for the photography lovers.

Very thorough, very nice, quite entertaining and interesting.

As someone who has a lot of trouble remembering names I found the quizzes quite hard (I was not pursuing the certificate so I didn't care if I failed) but I understand that since the class and the goals are subjective while the evaluation has to be objective it matters that those questions can be unambiguous.

All in all, I feel like I did learn to look at photographs differently, and to look at the world through photographs. I'll definitely recommend it to my friends!

Provides a good overview and appreciation of photographic images and their interpretation. The course material is well presented and easy to follow. There is a good range of extended reading provided, plus suggested further reading. The early course 'assessments' are a little bit odd in places, with very specific questions about a particular photography, that, in my opinion, do not add to the overall course experience, but overall its still worth it. If there was a more advanced follow on I'd be prepared to sign up.

The only loss of a star as the course wasn't what I was expecting. I was expecting a more detailed course on how to look at and understand images. However this course takes you through much of the history and development of photography up to the present day and as to how we the public receive images and how to understand them. I have learnt to look at images much more carefully and to think more about them both as you see them and more as to their deeper meaning.

This is a very interesting course that helps you to understand how an image can be read and interpreted. The focus is very much on the veracity of photography and on the decisioning process which goes through the process of taking pictures. I really enjoyed studying for this course. However, I would expect something more in terms of revision of the final assignment. I would expect some feedback also in order to understand if my reasonings were correct.

This course has helped me to increase my knowledge in the history of photograph, particularly the last weeks, which focused on more contemporary artists and allowed me to learn and critically analyse alternative forms of working with photographic material. Although the course does not include much technical information regarding the different photographic processes, it helps the learner to understand photography in a very comprehensive way.

Very interesting and rewarding course. It has developed a lot my knowledge concerning photography's history and its different uses. As a french speaker with a good english level, I still need to say some parts were a bit difficult to understand, mostly some of the reading assignments. But don't worry, it's possible to achieve it. You definitely won't regret to have taken this course if you have a (small) interest in photography!

This Course does a really great job in opening new perspectives about photography.

Each week stands for its own and yet they combine to give you a great understanding about photographies history, techniques and artistic value.

What I did not like that much, was that pretty much reading was required and that there was so much detailed information about the museums history included. That is why I rate 4/5