Fund for Teachers Fellowship in Full Swing
Creativity in Crete: Color and texture in Chania
A Photographic documentation of culture through travel
As a Fund for Teachers Fellow, I am attending a Creativity Workshop in Crete, Greece. The purpose of this trip to immerse myself in the act of visual journaling and documented learning. I am doing this in order to apply concepts for documented learning, and develop successful assessment measures for process-based and creativity learning.
Here’s a sneak peek at a self-designed photography project, I developed and work on daily while in Chania, Greece.
Travel photography is ‘a subcategory of photography involving the documentation of an area's landscape, people, cultures, customs and history. This project is about more than travel, it’s about documentation. It’s about capturing learning and collecting and curating knowledge through visuals. While it is one thing to make compositions, it is another to immersing yourself into learning through culture and aesthetics collectively. This project is about figuring out an answer to a question you’ve never been asked. It’s about going from place to place searching for similarities and differences, documenting them and forming your own learning.
This project is less about carrying a camera, but opening your eyes. This all comes with time of course, and doesn’t just happen overnight, but that’s where skills and ways of learning emerge.
I aim to capture my experiences to show others, in a detailed and dedicated manner. That is, using, exploring, and immerising myself in an independent study of Crete architecture.
Crete architecture varies a lot from town to town. Settlements were established in Crete island from the Minoan times and in fact excavations have unearthed very well-organized towns with public buildings, luxurious palaces and paved streets. The Minoan palaces of Knossos, Phaestos palace and Zakros are the most famous sites of that period. Crete island was also much influenced by the Venetians, who conquered the island in the 13th century. The Venetians constructed strong fortresses all around the island and established new towns. The old town of Chania, where I am documenting, has typical Venetian architecture with arched paved streets, high buildings and almost no balconies. As trade was much developed that time, the Venetians also constructed ports and dokcyards, such as the Venetian arsenals in Chania that host the Arsenali Centre of Mediterranean Architecture today.
