This Fashion Institute of Technology Photographer Finds Art in Mathematicians’ Chalkboards

“I realized over the years that math is a very creative process,” says photographer Jessica Wynne, a tenured professor at New York City’s Fashion Institute of Technology. That realization is one of many she reached while working on her latest project: Do Not Erase, a collection of 100 photos depicting a variety of chalkboards used by mathematicians. Set to be published by Princeton University Press in the fall of 2020, the endeavor took Wynne all around the globe for a year and a half. […]

Although she is enthusiastic about the wide-spread access to cameras in a world where virtually everybody with a phone can call himself a photographer (“it democratizes the medium!”), Wynne finds social media to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, she thinks of it as a great marketing tool used by her students to publicize their work. But, Wynne also says, “creating your identity through external validation could be a bit damaging.” Raising a daughter in the digital age is what seems to have shaped her beliefs about the subject: “Sometimes, I realize that she experiences things through her phone and I’m just like, ‘Let’s put our cameras away, and just experience the thing instead of shooting [the thing] to post it on Instagram.’”

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