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Interview with Bob Haft

Recent Teaching History
From Classic to Modern: A Traveling Seminar in Europe; Spring 2001
Myth and Sensibility: A Study of Eastern and Western Cultures; Fall 2000 - Winter 2001
Life as Art: Art as Life: Advanced Studies in Surrealism; Spring 2000
Paris, Dakar, Fort de France: Voices of Revolution; Fall 1999 - Winter 2000
Foundations of Visual Art; 1998-99
Discovering Greece: Exploring Aegean Civilizations; Winter - Spring 1998
Seeing the Light; Fall 1997

Photographer Bob Haft is one of the less-than-one-percent of folks who’s visual acuity is sharp enough to see the blue and red at the edges of the moon’s light spectrum. It frustrated him that no else he knew would admit to seeing it. It also frustrated him that his students didn’t see what was obvious to him in photographs--those of other artists or his own. Bob finally asked his optometrist if those colors were really there. When assured that what he saw was really there, that frustration was taken care of but not his problem with teaching photography. "‘Well big deal, so you can see it but we can’t!’" he imagined his students saying. "And it doesn’t help me to know that I can!" he thought.

Then, when he was studying French to get ready for a program in France, he discovered that his difficulties in learning French were "built in," as it were. He realized that because he was trying to speak French with the syntax and grammatical structures of English, he could speak only a sort of pidgin French. This insight led to recognition that we have a "matrix," as he terms it, in our visual understanding, as well as in our language. Thus emerged Bob’s principal artistic and intellectual topic: problems in communication caused by our not recognizing these matrices of comprehension.

In his own photography he has been making diptychs, paired images that (speaking of a series he made in a return trip to France) didn’t "make any particular sense singularly, but put together they made more sense. Sometimes there was a formal element in one photograph that was repeated in another, or a design that was in one photograph that was the same design in another, even though they were taken days or months apart--in different parts of the country. It was like I had a matrix in my head for seeing something, which you can translate ‘for saying something,’ and the next photograph would have the same matrix even though it was a different subject, different place, different everything." The photographs are images of one thing or another in France, at a particular moment, his diptychs are images of his perceptual matrix, not so easily changed by place and time.

Bob has a very simple standard for the work of his students, he wants them to make good art. He himself has been powerfully influenced in his own work by Cartier-Bresson. But Bob does not just tell the student what the standards are and goad them into meeting them. He does the same work his students are doing, relying upon his enthusiasm and leadership to encourage students to adopt the standard Bob has for his own work. His enthusiasm for his work, and the kind of thinking students are thereby privy to, makes it easier for students to forgive Bob’s frankness in critiques.

Students who have prepared themselves to do the work are in the fortunate position of qualifying for an independent study contract with Bob. He loves working with these students who have come to him for critiques of maximum detail, depth and seriousness about the craft.

Interviewer: Pete Sinclair

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Last Updated: March 15, 2007