Introducing the Visual Curriculum
On the overwhelm of learning about images, the psychology of why we study better together
Hi everyone,
The question I get most often, more than any question about portfolios, clients, rates, or creative direction, is some version of this:
Where do I actually start?
Where do I start learning about images? About fashion photography and why it looks the way it does? About visual culture, about theory, about the gaze, about why certain references carry weight and others don’t? I want to understand this properly. I’ve tried reading some books, but I get lost. I have seventeen tabs open. I’ve saved four hundred images on a mood board but I still can’t explain what connects them.
Every time I get this question, I give the same incomplete answer. Read Ways of Seeing. Watch the Diana Vreeland documentary. And people do and then they write back saying: okay, and now what? What comes after that? How do these things connect? What should I read next, and in what order, and how do I know when I actually understand something versus when I’ve just consumed it?
I have never had a satisfying answer to this. Until now really, because I wanted to come up with a better answer to all the DM’s.
There is a trend right now of people building their own curriculums, study plans, reading lists, personal syllabi shared on Substack and in newsletters. I find it genuinely exciting. It suggests that something is shifting: that people working in creative fields have started to feel the gap between what their formal education gave them and what their actual work requires. They are building the thing that wasn’t built for them.
But there is a problem with the solo curriculum. And it is not a discipline problem, most of the people I know who are piecing together their own visual education are extremely disciplined. They buy the books. They watch the documentaries. They read the essays. The problem is something else.
The problem is that learning alone is genuinely harder than learning together. Not because you need someone to hold you accountable, though that helps. Because knowledge is a conversation, and conversations require other people.
When you read a difficult text alone, you have no one to ask is this what they mean? When you look at a photograph alone, you have no one to say did you notice that? The ideas stay in your head, unverified, slightly uncertain. You’re not sure if you’ve really understood something or just read the words. The gap between consuming an idea and actually being able to use it, to talk about it, write about it, argue with it, is where solo learning often stalls.
There is a reason school works, even bad school. It’s not the curriculum itself.. It’s the container: a group of people agreeing to think about the same things at the same time, with someone to point them in a direction. The direction matters less than the shared attention. People reading about the same topic they are genuinely interested in and discussing. It’s like a bookclub, but learning about a broader subject.
Here is something else that is something I want to work on, and I feel a bit arrogant saying it, but the education I am talking about is not widely accessible. I learned most of it myself. Yeah I did go to shcool, but even then you learn a lot yourself because of your own curiosity in certain subjects.
The knowledge of how images work — the history of photography, the theory of the gaze, the global traditions of fashion and dress and visual culture, this knowledge exists mostly behind expensive walls. Art school, where you pay €40,000 a year and spend three years in critique rooms debating references. Academic journals, where a single essay costs €30 to download and assumes you have already read fifty other essays. The dense theoretical texts that are technically free to find but written in a language that requires a translation most people never received.
I went to a good school. And even there, what I learned about image history was almost entirely Western and almost entirely male and just maximum an hour a week. I learned about photography as if it began in Paris and New York. I learned about fashion as if it began on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The entire visual culture of Japan, West Africa, South Asia, Latin America, I discovered almost entirely by accident, years later, through other people and other rabbit holes.
That isn’t a personal failure, more structural really. The education that exists is incomplete, and it is expensive, and it isnt designed for people who are working full-time in a creative industry and have forty-five minutes in the morning before their day begins.
So here is what I built.
I’m calling it The Visual Education. It is a bi-weekly curriculum for paid subscribers — a study guide, arriving every two weeks, covering one idea from image history, fashion theory, or visual culture.
The theory is explained in the document itself, in plain language, not just pointed at. There is always a film or video to watch, an artist to look up, a text to read (with a free link wherever one exists). Each issue takes thirty to forty-five minutes.
It’s defintely not a school! But it is structured like one, in the sense that it has a shape, a sequence, a logic to what comes before and what comes after. And because it lives in a community of paid subscribers, it is something you do alongside other people who are thinking about the same things. You can leave comments. Start discussions. The shared attention is there (or at least I hope so if enough people join)
Season 1 runs sixteen issues across eight months. It covers the female gaze (Berger, Mulvey, bell hooks — and what the theory actually means in a fashion image). The history of fashion photography and how it invented its own visual language. West Africa and the portrait tradition that the West ignored for forty years. Japan and the Provoke movement and why it is in the DNA of everything that feels “raw” in contemporary fashion. Referencing, how to build a visual language instead of just a folder of images. Colour theory. The subculture photograph. And how concepts form.
The first issue is live now. It is called How to Look at an Image. It is built around a single question: who does every photograph assume is looking at it? And what changes when you can see that assumption? The issue includes five lessons: the central idea, the key reading (John Berger’s Ways of Seeing with a link to the free PDF), a film to watch, a comparison of two photographers who worked in the same genre and produced completely opposite gazes, and a prompt to work with. There is also a short quiz at the end.
The second issue, The Female Gaze, will be launched on April 14. From then on, every two weeks new issues are published for you to study.
If you are a paid subscriber, your access link is below at the end of this newsletter. Everything in this curriculum is yours, all published issues, immediately, with new ones arriving every two weeks. You’re not tied to anything and can simply use it for inspiration. Dip in and out when you want. That’s why I decided to built it on a seperate platform that Substack, so I don’t spam the people who don’t want it!
If you are on the free tier: this is what the paid subscription is for. You keep getting everything you already get. Paid subscribers get the curriculum in addition.
One more thing. I am building this as we go. It is a living document, which means it will be shaped, over time, by who is reading it and what they want to go deeper on. If you are a paid subscriber and there is something you want covered, or something that isn’t landing, tell me. The whole point is to actually teach something.
Love,
Zoe
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