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About Me and more…

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Being a photographer, my presentation includes several shots that I took either on assignment or while producing my own fine arts. The display of images is aimed to show the different fields I touch upon in my everyday professional practice as Photographer, Art Director, and Editor. My 25 years career experience and my curriculum are strongly informed by the fashion and advertising industry, Publishing Houses, music, contemporary arts and photography.

The reason why I chose to become a Lecturer, it is due to my strong will of “giving something back” to the Educational Institute, that has helped me to become the person, and practitioner I am. The course in Applied Imagination (that back then was named “Design Studies”) has been a turning point in my career, and it has contributed to shape my social identity. At times it’s been hard to show the people, how “transferable skills”, and being “broad” can be a “plus”, rather than “someone hard to place”.

My methodology at work is researched based, I am a problem solver, and I tent to address the process rather than the curriculum. It is the project that tells me, what it is the best media in which can be developed, sometimes it takes shape of a photographic exhibition, some other times perhaps a graphic layout or a written article. Quoting one of my favourite films, I might say that “everything is illuminated”.

Hopefully I’ll be able to inspire the students, providing them with something meaningful, useful, and long lasting reflections, for example, “Reading, engagement and higher education’, Higher Education Research & Development, 38 by Aldridge, D.”. fosters a fruitful reflection around methodologies, and the different approaches in teaching. I personally find Aldridge’s reflections very intriguing, in a way the reminded me of some theories by Albert Einstein, particularly when the “alienation” is considered as an opportunity, or perhaps a challenge, to ignite people’s engagement. The famous scientist says: “Humiliation and mental oppression by ignorant and selfish teachers wreak havoc in the youthful mind that can never be undone and often exert a baleful influence in later life.”

And then adds: “The real difficulty, the difficulty that has frustrated the sages of all times, is this: how can we make our teaching effective to the point that its influence on the emotional life of man can resist the pressure of the elementary psychic forces of the individual? We do not know, of course, if the sages of the past have really posed this question with the same awareness and in the same form; but we know how much they have tried to solve the problem.”

Creativity comes from anguish as the day comes from the dark night. It is in the crisis that inventiveness arises, discoveries and great strategies. Those who overcome the crisis surpass themselves without being ‘overcome’. Who attributes his failures and difficulties to the crisis, violates his own talent and gives more value to problems than to solutions. The real crisis is the crisis of incompetence. The inconvenience of people and nations is laziness in seeking solutions and ways out. Without crisis there are no challenges, without challenges life is a routine, a slow agony. Without crisis there is no merit. It is in the crisis that emerges the best of everyone, because without crisis all the winds are only slight breezes.

To speak of crisis means to increase it, and to be silent in the crisis is to exalt conformism. Instead, we work hard. Let’s finish it once and for all with the only dangerous crisis, which is the tragedy of not wanting to fight to overcome it. ”

Elena Arzani