In March 2020, art students around the U.S. left campus overnight—many leaving their partially installed senior shows behind. Five years later, an exhibition by Capital One Arts highlighted the uncertainty and creativity of teaching in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic—and of the connections forged during an unprecedented moment in time.
In March 2020, John Freyer, Associate Professor of Cross-Disciplinary Media at VCUarts, was returning from the Society of Photographic Education’s national conference where he connected with Anne Leighton Massoni, then the incoming dean of the International Center of Photography in New York City.
Shortly after, lockdowns closed campuses across the U.S. Another colleague, Betsy Schneider, who founded the first online photography B.F.A. program in the U.S. at Arizona State University, shared her recommendations for online teaching in a Facebook group for photography professors. That post brought Freyer, Massoni, and Schneider together and inspired the formation of FotoFika to help their colleagues make the transition to remote teaching.
The group’s name is a spin on the Swedish tradition of fika, or pausing to enjoy a coffee, snack, and socialization. Photography professors across the country signed onto Zoom every Wednesday to share strategies and hear from guest speakers. Topics ranged from creating studio lighting at home and darkroom techniques to self-care and having compassion for students.
“Our first meeting, we broke the [Zoom] limit. We had more than 100 people,” Freyer says. “We wanted to help our colleagues who had no experience [teaching online] with advice on how to do it, including sample assignments.”
One of the first challenges the group identified was how to help seniors whose final shows had all been canceled. For this, Freyer turned to artist and photographer Mike Mandel, who made a collection of 134 baseball trading cards of 20th century photographers. Mandel joined a meeting of FotoFika and helped launch a series of digital and physical trading cards featuring student work.
Freyer worked with Tom Woodward, then with VCU’s Academic Learning Transformation (ALT) Lab, to build a Google form where students could submit a single image and a 144-character statement. The student’s work was immediately posted to the FotoFika 2020 All Stars website as a digital baseball card. Nearly 400 students submitted their work.
“The call was for anybody graduating in the class of 2020,” Freyer says. “It wasn’t just for M.F.A. students or B.F.A. students. You could have a B.A., you could have an A.A. If you were graduating in photography and you’d been cheated out of your show, you could submit.”
To introduce students to the public, curators, professors, and other arts professionals were invited to review the student work and offer their own 144-character statement. Reviewers also earned a spot in the trading card deck. Curators from the Brooklyn Museum, the High Museum of Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art contributed.
“We got not one curator, but 134,” Freyer says. “I think it was the nature of the pandemic—of people being at home, of people having a generosity of spirit, of people wanting to be connected to each other.”
Five years later, that sense of connection was on Freyer’s mind as he worked with Capital One on an exhibition featuring the 2020 All Stars project.
FotoFika: 5 Year Anniversary, curated by Francis Thompson and Anthony Backherms, was on view in the Capital One Arts’ West Creek Multimedia Gallery on the Capital One Campus in Richmond this summer. It included 20 enlarged playing cards from the original deck, as well as an accompanying video showing reviewer comments and playing cards.
Freyer, Massoni, Schneider, and Becky Senf, chief curator at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, also revived FotoFika’s weekly gatherings with Capital One’s Thompson as the special guest. Returning to the Zoom room reminded Freyer of the unique connections that arose during a period of isolation.
“The best parts were the opportunities for interesting and weird and genuine connection,” he says. “There were cool things that came out of the pandemic that I don’t think we’ll do again. [The exhibition] was a chance to take a bit of time to think about the significance of what happened during that time and celebrate those students.”
