HIGH POINT, N.C., May 24, 2016 – High Point University students had the opportunity to photograph one of the world’s most exquisite cities during their “Maymester” trip to Paris, France.
The course titled, “Revolution in Paris: Art at the Turn of Two Centuries,” taught students to find a new way of photographing the city while exploring its past and future. As students travel home today, they reflect on the photographs that they took and saw while in Paris.
“This trip was important to me because I saw some of the places where my idols in photography made their famous work,” said HPU student Caroline Smith. “I loved that I saw the photographs that I have been learning about for years and the places where they were made.”
As students visited famous sites such as the Eiffel Tour, Versailles and Monet’s Gardens at Giverny, they took photographs and then worked with their instructors, Benita VanWinkle and Adrian Boggs, to edit and interpret what they had recorded.
“I wanted my students to experience the world of documentary photography from two perspectives, from High Point to Paris, and from two different time periods in photography, from around the turn of the 20th century and the turn of the 21st century,” said VanWinkle. “By helping them edit their photographs every couple of days, I saw their growth in what they are thinking, seeing and reacting to as far as visual information as well as beginning to have a real sense of the city of Paris. The intensive immersion of learning a new art form and being in such an amazing place provides concrete evidence that they are making strides not only in their photography, but in learning about another culture.”