That talk I gave at the d.a.i. wasn’t the only presentation about photography I gave on Tuesday. The last day of the class I’ve been taking on learning words that help you talk about art in German was Tuesday morning, and we each had a to give a 5-10 minute presentation about an artist and their work. When the teacher found out early on that I was a photographer, she asked me to talk about my own photographs during my presentation.

So, there I was Tuesday morning giving my presentation — all in German, of course, as this was a class that about improving your German. I was starting to talk about themes in my photographic work, and I showed the following photo, and said Das Foto zeigt eine Reflexion in einer Pfütze, “The photo shows a reflection in a puddle.”

Scene in the Street, Tübingen

Before I could get any further into my ideas and themes about puddles, the teacher stopped me.

Now, last year when I did my photography show at the language school, the owner of that school did a cute little presentation at the exhibition opening about how there are various ways to say “reflection” in German. So, I wasn’t positive that the word Reflexion was actually the correct word that is commonly used, although I thought it was the one the language school owner had settled on.

When I posted this photo on the blog last year, it wasn’t clear to me what the correct preposition would be to describe what we see in this puddle. Is that reflection of the building in the puddle? On the puddle? Under the puddle? So, I thought perhaps she was going to correct my use of “in” here.

But the teacher on Tuesday didn’t comment on those issues. Instead, she just asked me to repeat the last word, Pfütze, “puddle”. Now, I figured that was because my pronunciation of words in German that start with “Pf” and/or ones that have an “ü”  in them is never very good, and I often don’t pronounce them quite right. So I though she was just going to correct my pronunciation of Pfütze. Except, for the life of me I couldn’t hear a difference between the way she said it when she asked me to repeat it and the way I said it.

As it turned out,  she was stopping me because she was sure I was actually using the wrong word to describe the photo. A Pfütze, she explained, is left on the street after a rain storm. And clearly, to her, this photo wasn’t of a Pfütze.

Ah, but that’s exactly what it was a photo of.

She, along with the rest of the class were taken aback. One student had earlier commented in passing during his own presentation tha  paintings were his favorite art form because painters could do so many more creative things than one could do with just a photograph. [He didn’t know at that point that I was a photographer.] He’s not alone in that thinking, of course — the debate about whether or not photography is an art form as raged since the day after the first photograph was displayed in public in the 1800s. 😉

Anyway, I moved onto the next photo to show another of my puddle illusions:

Orange on the Side, Tübingen

At the end of the presentation, one student asked me to go back to this orange peel photo. He said he finally “got” it about these photos: he said that  what I must have meant to say was that these photos weren’t actually real reflections in puddles at all, but rather they were photos that were collages made from multiple photos. He said, that’s what you did, right,  add the building to the puddles to look like a reflection?  After all, he explained one doesn’t see real reflections like that in puddles, so it of course it’s fake, right?

Well, perhaps one doesn’t see reflections like that in puddles. But as you all know from reading this blog, I do. 😉

But I think he was just so puzzled by how that photo could be possibly have been a real puddle that he trying to figure out if it wasn’t just something about my explanation of the photo in German that was getting lost in translation. His German was definitely more fluent than mine – the students in the class had all studied German for far longer than I had, and it showed.

But in this case, it’s wasn’t a problem with the language. While I may not be fluent in German, it turns out I can accurately describe what this photo really is in German. Which is very satisfying from a language-learning point of view after less than a year-and-a-half studying German.

What what was even more satisfying, though, was to be have my own photos  challenge people’s expectations about the creative possibilities of photography. When you are showing off your photographic work, it doesn’t get much better than that. 😉