What is Education?

Someone asked recently what photographers, noted for their work, were self-taught. The list is long, Daguerre, Matthew Brady, William Henry Jackson, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Arnold Newman, Margaret Bourke-White, Ilse Bing, Philippe Halsman, Irving Penn and the list goes on and on.

Then I wondered, "Do I count?" I got my first camera, a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye, when I was five. No one "taught" me photography but I grew up in a household where a new Life and Look magazine arrived weekly and National Geographic came every month. I was always trying to figure out how they got those photos. It did not occur to me for years that they weren't using Brownies as well. As I got older, I studied Ansel Adams' books and Minor White's book on the Zone System and Aaron Sussman's "The Amateur Photographer's Handbook. Then I knew that those photographers were not using Brownies and I began saving to buy a Nikon. Although I was photo editor and a photographer for my college yearbook, I majored in economics. Now, without the formal training or degree in photography, art, fine art, etc., I am teaching photography at a local college.

Personally, I don't think of myself as "self-taught", but maybe self-educated. I learned photography from the great photographers of Look, Life, and National Geographic. I was "taught" by masters of photography, Steichen, Stieglitz, Adams, Minor White, Margaret Bourke-White, and master photography educator Aaron Sussman and the chemists and engineers at Kodak. What do you think; do I count as "self-taught"? Or, are we all indebted to those photographers that we have had contact with that came before us, regardless of our "education"