Episode 64 Jonathan Worth
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[00:00:00] Jonathan Worth: When I talk to my students about this, I think we are so lucky to be at this moment. We're so lucky because there have been a few moments in photography's history where it has changed fundamentally and the language hasn't kept up with the technology and the language has really held us back. 

[00:00:26] Alan Levine: Hello and welcome everybody. I'm Alan Levine. Welcome to another episode of OEG Voices. This is a podcast that we do here at Open Education Global and each episode brings you voices from around the world of those interested in the potential of open education and education in general.

[00:00:43] And I'm really excited today to be talking to a good friend and colleague who I just find fascinating and interesting for the way he thinks about teaching and his role and path going from professional photography into educator. Good to say hello to and to meet Jonathan Worth.

[00:01:02] Where are you coming to us today, Jonathan?

[00:01:04] Jonathan Worth: I am coming to you from my office in Nottingham in the middle of the UK. 

[00:01:08] Anyway, it's lovely to be here. Yeah. Thank you, mate. That was a very, very kind intro. Very kind intro. Yeah.

[00:01:12] Alan Levine: Well, tell me a little bit about Nottingham Trent and what you're doing there right now. I know you're teaching photography, but I imagine you're doing a lot more.

[00:01:20] Jonathan Worth: Trent's amazing. I am genuinely pretty psyched to be here. When I went off to study photography, there were two places in the UK that were on my radar and both were amazing for photography. One was Derby, which is just up the road, and it had the best black and white prints in the world there at the time, a guy called John Blakemore, still alive and he's amazing. 

[00:01:38] And then there was this other university in Nottingham, next city across which had Nottingham Trent College at the time. They had a reputation for photojournalism and for photography. Those colleges really were the two places to go to.

[00:01:51] I was wanting to learn from the +best printer in the world. Right. So I, I went to Derby and, but I've always had a sweet spot for NTU. And, yeah, and it's an amazing [00:02:00] place. I've come here now because they've just made a massive 42 million investment into this moment of convergence.

[00:02:05] And, back in terms of photography, it meant me writing three courses, three undergraduate courses, two new ones, and then rewriting the existing one. And with a very particular focus, I went full bore on my pitch. And they went for it. And so that's great.

[00:02:18] Other things of note about this university, it recruits more people who are first generation going to university than any of the university in the country, which means we have people who, you know, whose families historically haven't been able to afford to go on to college.

[00:02:30] It's an amazing place. I can honestly say I'm genuinely chuffed to be here.

[00:02:34] Alan Levine: Right. Great that you mentioned your start at going to Derby and choosing between Nottingham. Put aside the technology of photography, what's the same or what's different about learning to be a photographer when you were studying and for these new students coming in.

[00:02:49] Jonathan Worth: Yeah. So what's the same. So I think subjects that are about visual storytelling that are narrative led. That's the thing that hasn't changed. So although I wanted to  become a craft person, I want to learn this artisanal craft of making silver bromide pro prints.

[00:03:06] You can make a print, but you've got to make a photograph of something before you make a print, right? Unless you're just gonna be a professional printer, right? So you need to be able to make an image. And if you're gonna make one image, you might want to make more than one image. If you're gonna put more than one image together, you're going to create a tension between the images.

[00:03:17] When you start to put lots of images together, then you're going to create a narrative. And before you know it, you're telling stories. And so as David Campbell says in an amazing lecture that he did for us some years ago called Narrative, Power and Responsibility. He talks about narrative being the construction of meaning.

[00:03:35] He says this happened, then this happened, then this happened. And we link them together and we say there is a causal relation between them. There is an arc of time as well. But because these things happen, we know "this." Otherwise these are unrelated random facts or unrelated random events that just happen in the universe.

[00:03:53] But we string them together, we create meaning. 

[00:03:56] So I think that hasn't changed. And I think it's really important for us to remember that when we start to flap about the new tool or the new camera or the new TV or whatever it is, and it's like, okay, well, can you make sense with that thing?

[00:04:09] And can you tell a story? And can you affect attitudinal shifts? Can you affect behavioral changes? Because if you can do that, then that's pretty awesome. You know, and then you're an awesome storyteller. As far as like the craft thing goes, I mean, that's more important than ever. I teach that to these guys now, you need to be able to do something you can't digitize. 

[00:04:30] So if everybody can make images with their phone and I'm choosing my language really carefully here. So everyone can make images with their phone. Not many people can create a silver bromide photographic print that will last a hundred years, that is a one off that will age, whose metadata are the crinkles, are the fingerprints, are the stamp on the back, are the embossed corner, that's the metadata on that thing.

[00:04:52] So I think that's still really, really important. And that goes for any craft based and discipline as well. I think we have to use images and  our artifacts.

[00:05:01] Alan Levine: And so you went into the field, you're a professional photographer. Do some bragging, name some of the big shoots and people that you photographed? 

[00:05:08] Jonathan Worth: I photographed The Alan Levine.

[00:05:11] Alan Levine: [laughter] That doesn't even count. Come on, name some celebrities or what were some favorite photography shoots that you did?

[00:05:19] Jonathan Worth: Well, they're probably Cory Doctorow's, right? So that's probably my all time favorite. Because I photographed him for Popular Science back in like 2000, 2001, maybe. And here's a guy who's doing something really interesting with copyright.

[00:05:34] This is what I hear. I have no idea. I meet this guy. We chat, we make images, make some photographs of him. It's brilliant. Get on really well. I asked him what his deal is, you know, and he starts to talk about copyright and usage. And it begins a friendship. I'm really intrigued by this guy who is giving his eBooks away, as he is a writer, but he gives eBooks away for free.

[00:05:56] Immediately it was like, Oh, how does that work then? Because  why are people buying it if you're giving it away for free. It's a very sort of childlike thinking about what it was then. I still hadn't got my head around the difference between an artifact and an image, let's say in terms of the photograph and the image, or in terms of an ebook and an ephemeral hardback copy and so on.

[00:06:15] That commenced a sort of learning journey that to this day, I mean, I photographed him this year, I photographed his wife. 

[00:06:20] When all my other social media platforms have just collapsed and they are nothing like what I thought they were, and I struggle to find those people that I empathize with, I struggle to aggregate those conversations that I really learn from. I can just download Corey's Pluralistic and feel as though I'm still learning and still part of a conversation.

[00:06:39] So that's my favorite shoot. They're the ones I want when I assisted people because when I assisted other people photographers, like my mentor, Steve Pyke, then that was great because there was no stress. So I got to meet all the people who landed on the moon who were still alive and loads of people who got them to the moon.

[00:06:53] Alan Levine: I'm going to ask you to tell my favorite story. What was your change in this recognizing of what a photograph was  and what happens when it goes digital and many copies are made.

[00:07:04] Jonathan Worth: I think it has a strange relevance to this moment right now as well. When I left college, one of my mates said to me, he said, you know, I think you ought to get an email address. So that dates me and my leaving college, but also it's really important technologically to recognize that. 

[00:07:17] As I was leaving college, Photoshop was really sort of establishing itself. And people like me were sort of saying, No, I don't like that. It's a bit dirty. It's not real photography, is it? I then launched myself into a trying to scrabble into a career as a photographer, not knowing anyone in the industry. To cut a long and boring story short, you know, eventually I, I met this, my mentor who I had admired whilst I was at college.

[00:07:39] I worked with him, a traditional documentary portrait photographer. And then I started working for myself and gradually, I began to sort of get a bit of success. I began to get my images began to be used by magazines. I began to get commissioned and I began to establish myself as being known as an editorial portrait photographer who photographed famous people for the covers of magazines. But what [00:08:00] people don't know me for or knew me for was the fact that I would use that money then to pitch my own stories. And I would then do documentary stories, which I did far more of than the famous people. But people just remember the famous people.

[00:08:12] My business model was that I was working editorially, not for advertising companies, . So typically I'd be being paid 150, 200 pounds a page 300 a page if I was lucky. And if you're only shooting cover, you might get double that, but that's all you get. 

[00:08:26] My business model relied on me reselling the images that didn't get used in the magazine. So that was my business model. And if you think about that a kind of like a scarcity business model. In order for the magazine to print it, I had to send them a print, which they'd scan and then put onto the magazine and so on.

[00:08:42] As photographs became images and they started [to] proliferate on the internet, my scarcity business model really began to collapse around me. As it became harder and harder for me to sell images or to make a living, I became more and more frustrated. I used the only thing that was there that I could use really, I felt at the time, which was  copyright.

[00:09:00] I thought that because I made the image that I owned the image and therefore in order for you to reproduce the image that you had to ask my permission. Now, if I then denied you that permission, you couldn't reproduce it and therefore I could keep my images scarce. That was my thinking because that was very much sort of pre-web thinking.

[00:09:16] No matter how many times I sent emails out to people, asking them not to use my images without paying me, people would use my images all over the place, they'll use them on blogs all over the shop. And so there became this one moment where I'd photographed Heath Ledger.

[00:09:30] And he was pretty famous at the time. He was a big deal. And, it was for a big magazine and I spent the day with him. We had a wicked day. It was, it was great. He was so lovely. There were so many nice things about that guy, the more time I spent with him, the more I sort of grew to love this, this guy.

[00:09:46] By the end of the day, I just wanted to be him. 

[00:09:49] And the images went in the magazine, it was great. And then, I'd sent him, I think I'd sent him a range of images to the magazine for them to choose from. And suddenly my images started to pop up online. The  ones that otherwise hadn't been seen, these images that I would save. And I would normally sell. I sort of managed to find the source that came most quickly, I think it was. And I sent this horrendous email to this person and I just let go with everything really. I sort of accused them of theft.

[00:10:15] I said, you know, would you steal my children's toys? I didn't even have kids at the time. You know, would you steal the food from my plate? All this sort of thing. It's awful. I'm saying it now. Every time I repeat this story, I asked for forgiveness because I am so ashamed that I did this.

[00:10:31] And what I got back was this weepy email from this, whatever she was 14, 15 year old girl in middle America who was broken and terrified that her parents were going to find out, right. That her parents going to find out that they were going to go to prison. They're going to lose the house. Cause she's been stealing stuff all over the place.

[00:10:51] I decided there and then that this is not the person I wanted to be. This is not the business I want to be in. This is just not for  me. And this is pre meeting Corey, just to put this in a timeline as well. So this is 2000, actually, this is 2000. So I must've met Cory in 2002, 

[00:11:08] And I sent her some pictures that hadn't been published. I apologized, you know, it was great. , Oh, it's just pathetic. I just gave her loads of stuff. And, um, I didn't realize, you know, the reason I found her so quickly is because it wasn't just any little girl.

[00:11:20] She was the go to, she was the authority on Heath Ledger. She was a super uber fan and and because I sent this stuff to her, she started to vouch for me. She started to tell this good story about me and then she then directed all her traffic to me. Right. So I was so stupid, I was so stupid and so slow that I hadn't thought that this I could supply to these individuals.

[00:11:44] This is pre eBay, man. This is pre Etsy. I thought that I had to sell through an agent. It's just, just so juvenile, my thinking. So I didn't capitalize on the moment. If I had have been quick enough, I think my business model, my business would have changed and I would have carried on doing exactly what I was doing much more successfully at the time, but I didn't.

[00:12:05] I let it go, thought it was great, big pass the bat, loads of traffic, awesome. And struggled to find other ways of operating. 

[00:12:11] Eventually I think the penny did drop, obviously it dropped because I worked out that there is a difference between an image and an artifact, where images reach out and connect people, artifacts bring people together. Whereas as images, I was thinking by lots of images being out there in the world of mine, that it would devalue them. It's completely the opposite. As Cory says most people like me don't need to worry about piracy. We need to worry about obscurity. That was definitely what I needed to worry about because the more she put my name out there, the more people heard of me, the more there was demand for me, the more there was demand for my product. And I just wasn't quick enough to supply to it at the time. But that helped me to understand the difference between the two things. 

[00:12:52] Alan Levine: As you're about your career and the role of mentorship and people who taught you, but not like in the way we necessarily think  of teaching, but in the practicality. So is that a key aspect of your work now as well? How do you create those same opportunities for your students that you were able to tap into?

[00:13:10] Jonathan Worth: Well Cory said it actually explicitly, he never taught me things. And I would say immediately that he has been a mentor figure for me, but so was Steve Pyke as well, not just in the way he made photographs, but we came from the same background.

[00:13:20] He's very much a barrow boy work ethic, and I learned from him how one navigates a system that perhaps it wasn't the class that you were born into and he certainly wasn't either. 

[00:13:30] Well, I situate myself as a co- learner, mate. That's exactly what I do because I am a complete charlatan and I know full well that, like most of us, we have this sort of imposter syndrome and I embrace that.

[00:13:40] I asked questions that I don't know the answers to. And together, I set us out and together we're going to find answers to this. You know, they're the best questions, I think. That's where you can learn the most. 

[00:13:50] And I literally just walked out of an AI class, right, with a guy who is stumbling through this stuff. He's been given the job of him to teach it. He's terrified. He's got four teachers in the room. None of us know  what we're doing. And he says to me, I don't think I should be teaching this stuff. He said Jon, God forbid we should get students in. I said, look, now is the time to get students in.

[00:14:08] Where is there a better place to learn? And who are the better people to learn with than us. Aside from that, we're actually paid to do this. 

[00:14:14] But just situate ourselves as co-learners. And understanding how younger people sort of interpret technology and find purpose with technology is going to be so valuable, for that's how we learn what we need to teach.

[00:14:28] I think that's what Cory did for me . And I think that's what Steve did as well. They never positioned themselves as teachers. They just, " we're trying to work out wicked problems and let me come along for ride. 

[00:14:39] Alan Levine: And, I remembered when you were teaching in Coventry, your phonar classes, you had a lot of assignments where you were asking students to think about this relationship between photographer and subject. I might think you just walk in the room, you set up your equipment, you know, they pose and you take pictures, but you're developing this relationship with them, that you're not just there to take  their picture. Right?

[00:15:01] Jonathan Worth: No, no, God, no. You're not a camera operator. Just go to YouTube if you want to be a camera operator. No, being a photographer, I think is acknowledging there are three people in every photograph, right? There is always the photographer, there is always going to be the subject and there was always going to be the audience. 

[00:15:17] Consistently the person out of those three that is the weakest, is always going to be the subject. They are when you make the photograph of them and then when you stick it out there and into the world, you know, you literally silence the subject and there's nothing they can do. 

[00:15:32] And so there is a huge responsibility with representing someone who is in a weaker position than you. So, yeah, camera operation shouldn't even enter your head when you're looking to make an image with someone, a photograph of someone or with someone. It should only be about empathy and then about putting them at ease and then about enabling them to, you know, it depends on what sort of story you're doing, right?

[00:15:55] But tell their story, express themselves, or I don't know, Steve Pyke  told me one thing which I never forgot. He could get intimate with somebody. I mean, he comes from a very working class background and he did go to college, I think he got kicked out straight away.

[00:16:10] He's like a rough diamond. He's a beautiful man, but he's charming, but he's pretty raw, right? And so you get an elbow in the ribs. It's an elbow in the ribs and a nudge and a wink. But I've been with him and he's photographed kings and queens, with the same way he deals with people. And within minutes, sometimes seconds of meeting, he'll be so close that the last person to be as close as him to the subject, kissed them before they went to work. And that's it. And he says that because he worked with a Raleigh. So Raleigh flex camera, you look down.

[00:16:44] So it's great because you've not put it up to your face. You're not actually going to kiss someone. You're down here. And so it's a much more passive way of photographing. But he would photograph. Almost touching their nose. I mean, if you look at his pictures, it's always this. It's always cropped like this, so it's right in close.

[00:16:59] But he would make them feel at ease. And, just being around that, that was amazing. And Steve, you won't mind me saying, he really struggled technically. He was always worried about the technical stuff. I won't give you any geeky stories about that, but I can vouch for it.

[00:17:16] Alan Levine: I know you have them, so I'll come back to that. You mentioned, trying to get an understanding of AI. I wanted to play out this picture about what is the meaning of a photograph now when you can generate really lush photorealistic, surrealistic, beautiful or bizarre imagery without having a camera. What are we looking at as the future of image making?

[00:17:36] Jonathan Worth: I'll join you in asking that question. So I too am wondering about what the future of image making is. And I'm proactively trying to be a voice in that, or an active participant in that conversation. I certainly don't know where it's going. But, I think there are lots of red herrings and the first thing is to avoid the red herrings.

[00:17:55] So avoid this obvious mistakes that it's almost set up there as traps, you know? So what is the point? That's one, ignore that. Is photography dead? Give that a swerve. That never helps. Do we need photographers anymore? Again, just again, ignore that one sidestep.

[00:18:11] When I talk to my students about this, I think we are so lucky to be at this moment. We're so lucky because there have been a few moments in photography's history where it has changed fundamentally and the language hasn't kept up with the technology and the language has really held us back.

[00:18:26] So it's a bit of Marshall McLuhan's rear view mirror as far as technology goes, you know, so always look in the rear view mirror. And as we try to describe something in terms of something old, we really limit the potential of something new. Obviously we think of examples like a camera, which used to be a camera obscura, which actually used to be a room, which then became this little box, which was like a room, a darkened box.

[00:18:47] And now we carry this thing around this little sort of mindless slab. This is our camera now. And of course it's not as a supercomputer. I think we need to push on past our expectations for AI if we're only going to think of them in  terms of that darkroom process that I described earlier on.

[00:19:03] But here's something I think is really cool. So if photography broke away from painting, which it did, and we know that through people like the f/64 group, when it stopped trying to be like crappy paintings and started to try and be really sharp, beautiful images, that it really established itself.

[00:19:17] Then there was another moment where sort of image making and images broke away from photographs. And David Campbell talks about this in his 2014, essay that he wrote for the World Press Photo Foundation, I think it's called "The Integrity of the Image." And in there he cites that a JPEG generated by your camera is only 25 percent trace representation.

[00:19:38] So when Fred Ritchin talks about the photographs being trace representations of the world, or I think it's John Berger described "a quotation from appearances." So the JPEG image is 25 percent of that trace representation, and then 75 percent of it is interpolated. It's made up. It's an algorithmic guess.

[00:19:56] 100 percent of the color is demosaiced, I think it's termed. That idea  that the image is the photograph is nonsense. So we need to break away. The images are completely different to photograph. So if we talk about images now, that's awesome. Images again are now making this amazing leap. Another breakthrough moment.

[00:20:14] Aside from the fact that I'm told that the actual percentage within that your iPhone uses trace information is like less than 1 percent now...

[00:20:23] Alan Levine: Meaning that the information it's recording, it's mostly interpolated?

[00:20:27] Jonathan Worth: Yes. So I'm told. I'm speaking to the professor who's promises me he's going to prove that to me and show me. But, that's mind blowing. But here's the thing, right? Photography historically has always been involved, always been concerned with the past. Right? Obviously, but that's it's evidential quality, isn't it? So it photographs the past. So I think we're at a moment right now that where photography is going to photograph the future for the first time. And I think that's super cool. 

[00:20:51] So we're doing a project at the minute where we're working with a fashion course who have designed these smart fabrics. Ostensibly, targeted at older people  who may be prone to fall out falling over. So it's a pair of socks, right? You stick your socks on and your socks will know to within a 95 percent whatever it is, chance, if you're going to fall over or not immediately. Clever socks. So that's where you sort of literally put yourself inside a computer.

[00:21:15] And then we're working with the the sports department here as well, sports courses where you put a computer inside yourself. So you put a computer in your gum shield and that tells you if you're liable to suffer from a brain injury, if you're impacted and impact sport. So if you put all these things together and you've got a photographer who's unshackled themselves from photographing 2D images that they're going to stick on a wall.

[00:21:37] And now they're actually thinking about 3D capture so that they can do so much more than making posters. Then suddenly we have a 3D capture of a person and we know if they're going to fall over and we know what's going to happen to their internal organs when they do fall over. We can actually know what that's going to look like, which for me is like, who wouldn't want to do that?

[00:22:02] That for me is why I'm excited about in terms of photography and that's what my photographers are thinking about. They're thinking about on the fashion photography course, they're thinking about this aesthetic vision of the world. On the photography proper course, they're thinking about engaging with audiences and crafting artifacts that can't be digitized.

[00:22:19] And then in sports photography course, they're thinking about new experiences for audiences. Experiences that are no longer third person. That are now first person. 

[00:22:29] Alan Levine: And when you're talking about those photographs, it's like less about light hitting a sensor, you know, cameras are gathering data, right?

[00:22:36] Someone said the Hubble telescope, we look at these beautiful images, but they're not photographs at all.

[00:22:41] They're all this electronic data that are represented. They're Important and they tell us something and they can be beautiful at the same time.

[00:22:49] Jonathan Worth: Absolutely. If you think about this sort of slab that I picked up here earlier on, most of us as photographers now will make images for slabs, right? We'll make them for screens. And all of these screens  come with speakers. And then most of those screens want to show moving images as well.

[00:23:04] So I think that data that we capture isn't just limited to the visual either. I'm thinking definitely it's the aural as well. It's an amazing opportunity , to have this sort of potential to have storytelling that isn't just fettered by the visual, right? Now, finally, we can make immersive experiences for the visually impaired, right?

[00:23:24] As photographers, we can legitimately do that now, which is awesome. Why are we making photographs for radio? You've heard me saying that for, what, 10 years now? Yeah. So I, I am absolutely buzzing about that right now.

[00:23:37] Alan Levine: I know you mentioned the slab. Do you shoot film anymore?

[00:23:41] Jonathan Worth: Yeah, I do shoot film. And I've got film that's older than some of the people probably listening to this, I imagine. I do shoot film. And we have a resurgence in it. So we've really doubled down on our sort of darkroom stuff here, which is another reason why I was excited to come.

[00:23:52] So I do, and I love it. And it has a quality and it has a process that is now like almost meditative.  It wasn't, but back in the day when I used to shoot and you know, my friend assisted Jurgen Teller and occasionally I went along with him. Teller was a fashion photographer who shot with 35mm cameras, little ones, point and shoots, and if you are into photography, you'll know his look. And, he would shoot with two at a time.

[00:24:15] Literally snap, snap, snap like this all the time from all and not seldom in front of his face. So he would just fly through film and I remember the guys when I was working with Steve and I was assisting him and there was 12 frames on a roll of 120 film and on a Rolleiflex, I would have to count the frames so that on frame 10 I'd break up in a new roll so I was ready to hand him that to take the next one away. And if I broke a roll when he wasn't going to shoot anymore, then I'd be in trouble for wasting film. 

[00:24:38] So film was pretty stressful, but it was fast because there was so much of it. And it was the cheapest way to produce stuff.

[00:24:44] But right now, cause it's so expensive, it's like, it's so slow.

[00:24:48] Alan Levine: But that's good , you're teaching dark room and film photography?

[00:24:52] Jonathan Worth: Yeah, I'm still teaching Ansel Adams zone system. 

[00:24:54] Alan Levine: I think it's beautiful. Where is that used though? Yeah, where do they do that? 

[00:24:59] Jonathan Worth: [ Mean, zone system for me is invaluable, rather than light values. That for me is great. 

[00:25:03] Week One Year One, one on one. Yeah. They just come in and they and they start from the slowest. And then, so the first half of the first year is all the kit in the building. And then the second half of the first year is we call One Behind the lens, One in front of the Len. So all that AI stuff and so on comes in the second half of the first year, as does film, as does, you know, sound and so on. 

[00:25:24] The darkroom, everybody does it, but everyone doesn't have to keep doing it. But it's really important that you are able to create something that can't be digitized and understand that concept of being able to create ephemera that can be sold if you want to work as an artist. A lot of kids that come here want to work as artists.

[00:25:40] Alan Levine: I was also thinking like about that question of what is the photograph. Like this morning I go outside and take my walk, a beautiful sunrise. I take a couple of pictures because I enjoy it. But do we lose that connection with the moment in the place if it's all done on this screen device? What does that mean for photography? I've not created a lot of AI  stuff. So maybe it is a personal process of creation. But it doesn't seem to have that moment feel. 

[00:26:05] Jonathan Worth: Definitely not. No. And I would go back to what I was saying a while ago, which is don't conflate them. They're wildly different things and they're going to be really good for very different reasons. Here's a good example of this. There's a photographer called Ian Campbell Cole, who I think is making some of the most interesting and beautiful images that I know right now at this week.

[00:26:24] And he is a product designer if you look at his Instagram account, then he includes his prompts in there. And this is one of the reasons why I really like following him because I can see these really beautiful images that are just really quiet and just really beautiful.

[00:26:40] But then I can see how he's described it. And his description is like a beautiful piece of prose. 

[00:26:45] Here's the thing. He uses that to design stuff that he then goes and makes. Back to crafting pieces from leather, back to crafting pieces from materials. So that becomes a part of his creative process.

[00:26:57] Going away and experiencing that walk in the woods where you want to grab a moment of it because you don't want to forget it. I don't think for a second that one would replace that. 

[00:27:05] I mean, I see these horrendous adverts for Google phones online, right? And it says, " Oh, look at this great picture of me and my great mates."

[00:27:12] And I take a picture. Boom and like three of them have got their eyes shut. And one of them's looking the other way. It's like, no worry. You can just turn their head around. And that will open their eyes and, put a new head on that one. It's like, yeah, but dude, that I wasn't there. 

[00:27:22] That isn't kind of what it was like. So for me, that is entirely, hollow. But maybe for a generation that love their filters and so on, maybe it's different. But I don't think they'll replace them. I don't think you need to worry about that Alan, at all. I don't think it's going to devalue your pictures that you make when you go out for your walks.

[00:27:39] Alan Levine: I appreciate that. What are you most excited about that you're going to be starting maybe in the new year or, Um, class wise or photography wise or image wise? 

[00:27:49] Jonathan Worth: I'm in that moment where it's like just sort of terror to be honest. 

[00:27:52] So this new sports photography course, you know, I came here and there were two titles on the table and I pitched for writing one on fashion and one on sport, which I never would have chosen myself, but the more I got into it, and the more I speak to people and I have yet to meet someone who doesn't get excited when we talk about it.

[00:28:08] That, I think has massive, massive potential. If I think about young people now, the ones that come through that we teach there are profound differences between them and me at their age and subsequently what I've grown into.

[00:28:21] So if I think about my formative years generally, they were spent watching TV. And that's the very third person way of seeing the world. It makes someone who is patient enough to watch adverts, for example, right? So, the young people that are coming through now, they have spent their formative years playing video games, being, you know, the heroes of their own story.

[00:28:42] They don't understand video. They don't understand adverts, right? That's the other hilarious thing is "why are you watching adverts? " So there is something quite profound. 

[00:28:47] What that means is that I think their media consumption is, there's gonna be a drive or an openness to have first person media consumption. I think that means literally for the photographer, it means of course they would stand pitch side and make pictures of the game, but I think they will also make pictures in game as well.

[00:29:05] And that doesn't mean just like in eSports , it means in the game. And I think they're gonna have to make pictures that are gonna become games as well, because , well, it's what we're teaching. We're teaching 3D capture. So you can capture the entire event to then experience that event. 

[00:29:19] If you're gonna watch a soccer match, why would you watch it from the pitch side? Why wouldn't you watch it through the eyes of Lionel Messi? And so why wouldn't you do that? And then if you think about the coach, of course, the coach is going to want to see this. Did the defender, whether it was the midfielder looking that way or this way, or it was a goalie looking the right direction when this shot went in or when that person wasn't passed to, right?

[00:29:36] Of course, it's going to become much more engaged and much more dynamic. So that I think puts the photographer who says they're going to be a strong voice in this conversation into a great spot. And that, that really excites me. 

[00:29:50] That's where I'm at right now, as we write content and draw people into the course and finding great excuses to pull people in who should not by any rights have any place on a photography course up until this point in history.

[00:30:05] But now it's like, why wouldn't you have a technologist in here? Why wouldn't you have a futurist in here? Of course you would. 

[00:30:09] Alan Levine: Is the demand high for students wanting to take photography? 

[00:30:12] Jonathan Worth: When they hear about it, literally it's just launched. We want you to start to talk about how the conversations, then you start to point at stuff. On my sales pitch, at the end I show this picture of this guy who's jumped out of a balloon, he's on a swing, he's behind a balloon that's high in the sky, obviously, and he's got his parachute on his back. And he's clearly swinging through under this balloon, where he's going to jump off at some point. And it's a Red Bull advert. I always say, you know, I just put that picture there. I just say, if Red Bull were going to design a sports photography degree, this would be the course they would design. 

[00:30:41] Because that's what I want to do. 

[00:30:43] Alan Levine: All right. You got to send me that image so I can use it in the story.

[00:30:46] Jonathan. Always, I just get so inspired and energized talking to you and, I just appreciate you taking the time for this conversation. You always open my mind. 

[00:30:56] Jonathan Worth: Thanks Alan. It's always nice to touch base and let's do it again sometime.

[00:30:59] Alan Levine: We will. I'm going to thank everybody for listening to this episode of OEG Voices and along with our very, very unique guest, we pick out a different musical track selected from the Free Music Archive. For today's show, I always try to match our subject, I have a track called Picture it All by Lorenzo's Music licensed under Attribution, Share-Alike license. And you'll find this episode at our site voices. oeglobal. org, and we hope you engage in follow up conversations with Jonathan in our OEG Connect community. 

[00:31:29] And if you're listening, and I hope you are, and would like to share your open education work or suggest a future guest, please let us know via our website, or send us an email, or just find us anywhere we are. And just thank you very much for being part of this episode.

[00:31:43] And take care, Jonathan, and hope to see you soon.