Popular Photography Classes Bring the Arts Into Focus

When Nsebong Adah ’26 saw his photography shown in a Harlem exhibition in October, he couldn’t believe how far he’d come in the last two years. “I literally had to sit on the ground in the middle of the gallery and just like process,” he said.

Adah, an African American studies major, became more interested in photography through classes at Princeton. Sitting in the darkroom of the Program in Visual Arts (VIS), he reflected on his gratitude for the peers and instructors he’s met at the University. In such an academic atmosphere, these photography classes are a welcome creative respite for many students. And for some, they’re a professional jumping-off point.

“I personally feel like there’s something unique happening at this place,” Adah said, mixing chemicals by hand while talking. “It’s just something you can kinda feel in the air.”

Adah isn’t the only student to feel this way. For Princeton’s Introduction to Digital Photography class, “there are 50 students on the waitlist for 12 slots,” said Jeffrey Whetstone, current instructor of that class and director of Princeton’s photography program.

VIS classes at Princeton — from the intro courses to 400-level classes such as Photography as Poetic Record — are notoriously difficult to get into. While students majoring or minoring in the program (selected through a competitive application process) have enrollment priority, these 12-person classes are normally filled by students from nonartistic disciplines.

Whetstone likes to describe his class as an atypical approach to photography, focused on how to think about images, not just make them. “We are not an art school,” he said. “We’re a liberal arts university with a really dynamic art program, so we are not teaching the same things art schools teach.”

Whetstone plans to experiment with larger class sizes going forward, saying he believes that introductory photography should be available to all interested students. “I think it’s an important class to take,” he said, “even if you never take any other art class in your life.”

Princeton has built a reputation for its photography program. With a “million-plus-dollar darkroom,” as Whetstone says, the University is an outlier. Whetstone is a Guggenheim fellow, as is his fellow photography professor Deana Lawson. The third departmental teacher, Jim Welling, is, as Whetstone said, “a canonical figure in photography.” All three offer introductory classes.

Tomoka Ohmori ’27, a geosciences student, had no previous arts experience before enrolling in Whetstone’s fall semester class. “He’s kind of like a person who throws us into the ocean and lets us learn how to swim,” she joked.

Despite initially finding the course difficult, Ohmori said that she’s improved as a photographer and made friends in other majors through the closely-knit, feedback-driven class dynamic. The course, she added, has helped her learn to be more patient.

Whetstone said that while many students come in with little experience, find a comfortable space, and then move back into their academic lives, others in the program go on to work in the field of photography.

That serious photo community is something Adah is grateful for. The exhibition that Adah’s work was featured in was curated by Collin Riggins ’24, who was recently named a fellow at the Magnum Foundation. Riggins and Adah became friends and collaborators while at Princeton. “The photography community here is pretty tight,” said Adah.

Throughout our interview in the darkroom, Adah would intermittently look at the photographic paper floating beneath him, watching the images reveal. His sentences would trail off and he’d go silent. When he realized he had stopped talking, he would look up and laugh, a huge smile on his face.

Photography, Adah said, has helped him break out of the routine of Princeton classes.

“It helps me be a lot more intentional about giving myself time to do what I actually want to do,” he said. “Because I do love photography so much. It’s like a flow state.”