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In our recent workshop at the Huntington Museum of Art, we had the opportunity to try out one of the few exercises from DWWP that we’d not used in a classroom before: the Sum of its Parts (page 23). This is a version of an activity we found in a few advertising class syllabi and the idea is this: students are given a randomly-chosen photo (or drawing) that has no caption identifying it. They then choose three words, and juxtapose each word with the image, one at a time. (In this iteration, students each took a photo torn out of a magazine and quickly wrote three words on index cards. We put all the photos on a wall and then tacked the index cards under their respective photos one at a time.) The group discusses how the meaning changes with each juxtaposition.

Here are a couple of our students’ works. The conversations these stimulated were really interesting!

(We removed the captions before handing students the images, and they juxtaposed one of their words at a time. We’ve re-added the credit information so that the copyright holder is clear. )