When a ‘click’ becomes a question: Unteaching photography

This article examines the current state of photography education in Australia amid neo-liberal restructuring, government disinvestment and the emergence of generative AI. It reflects on what is at stake when photography loses its disciplinary purchase, as well as the educator’s contradictory position working within systems that actively dismantle space for critical reflection. Prompted by the closure of a university photography programme and the wider decline of institutional support for photography as a discipline, this article examines the political and institutional factors that have made photographic practice and education increasingly uncertain. Drawing on the work of bell hooks and Ariella Azoulay, this article raises questions about what is lost when photography is instrumentalized for market outcomes and what it might mean to teach photography otherwise, if teaching it at all remains possible. It reflects on ‘unteaching photography’ as a potential way forward, using the camera’s ‘click’ as a contested gesture. It asks, most urgently, if photography education offers a space to think creatively and critically about images and their entanglements with power, what occurs when that space disappears?