Johannes Itten, a teacher at Bauhaus in the 1930s, asked his students to draw two lemons sitting atop a bright green book. The students whipped off their drawings in a few minutes of what they saw as a simple prompt and sat back to wait. Itten then approached the still life setup, took one of the lemons, cut it into slices, and passed it out to the students to taste. “Are you sure you have captured the reality of the lemon?” he asked. Smiling in comprehension, they then set back to work. Itten devised Problem Sets as a vehicle to work on basic problems of design; this tool was later picked up and adapted by photographers including Francesca Woodman who used the technique as a working method for her photography. In this course we’ll work on five Problem Sets, ranging from very simple and formal (“describe a space”) to more complex and abstract (“on being an angel”) — and look at photographers like James Casabere or John Divola, who work with a similar, serial approach.