Using data from videotaped recordings of photography workshops and critiques, this dissertation investigates the discursive practices used by photographers and apprentice photographers to transform events in their domain of professional scrutiny into the knowledge representative of their profession. Specifically, it investigates the linguistic and embodied practices photographers deploy and the mediated activities in which they engage in order to determine appropriate color and meaning in a photograph, two distinct arenas that define one's professional competence. In this sense, this dissertation views language as embedded in consequential activities and apprenticeship in the cognitive structure of a profession. As such, language is central to any examination of how an individual calibrates a professional vision toward the objects and environments that are consequential to that profession. For apprentice photographers, seeing what counts as appropriate color in a photograph is often problematic and must be accomplished collaboratively with expert photographers through the deployment of a number of professional practices. These practices involve the use of a specific technical language, specific ways of using deictic terms for referring, as well as the categorization of color. In contesting and examining color in a photograph, apprentice and expert photographers engage in a process of learning that is distributed and mediated by a number of professional tools. This is also true of learning to assign 'meaning' to a photograph, a complex process for apprentice photographers, which is far from transparent. Through class critiques in which students talk about and confront each other's work and engage in open discussions with expert viewers, apprentice photographers are exposed to the various "repertoires of speaking" as well as the various ways of doing assessments and instruction that define their profession.
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