Description

Join photographer Matt Black for a five-day, intensive workshop designed to sharpen your relationship to photography using New York City as an inspiration. 

Matt will guide you to think critically about your work and consider your vision, your voice, and its role in the world.  Building on this foundation, we will work towards sharpening the language of your photography so that it more closely aligns with your ideas and  goals, highlighting your ability to interpret and visualize the world in a personal way  Participants will leave the class with a more focused and full formed approach to their photography, as well as an increased understanding of editing and sequencing.

This five-day course comprises two sections. The first part is a four-day intensive workshop photographing in the streets of New York.  Working as a class, we will produce new work on a joint theme. Through daily image-making, and personal review sessions, we will strive to bring out the unique qualities and point of view of each participant’s work.  On the final day, we will create a joint edit of the week’s work, highlighting each individual photographer’s vision.  

Participants should bring a 20-40 image portfolio of their previous work, a digital camera, thumbdrive, and a laptop for editing. 

Deadline to book: July 1, 2023

This workshop is limited to 12 participants and is open on a first come first served basis.

Book here.
Payment plan available.

 

This workshop offers:

  • Practical advice on how to approach photographing on the street
  • Learn about framing and composition
  • A deepened understanding of your photographic vision and voice
  • Group review sessions
  • Editing session
  • A 50-page workbook on how to get started in photography

Takeaways:

By the end of the workshop, participants should…

  • Have a thoroughly planned and critically informed self directed body of photographic work
  • Be able to demonstrate creative, visual, and technical abilities
  • Engage in informed, critical self-reflection and the ability to critique peers
  • Demonstrate an understanding of editing photographs for different outputs
  • Develop an understanding of the variety of ways in which photography can function as a means of personal expression and as a documentary record

“A good picture is something that immediately transports you to another life. That puts you into an emotional, human reality in a way that doesn’t work on an intellectual level, but works on an emotional level. That makes me feel that this is 100% true and that I can connect to what this person is feeling.” – Matt Black

Matt Black is from California’s Central Valley, a rural, agricultural area in the heart of the US state. Between 2014 and 2020, he traveled over 100,000 miles across 46 states for his project, American Geography, published by Thames & Hudson in 2021, accompanied by a traveling exhibition that opened at the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg. Other works include The Dry Land, about the impact of drought on California’s agricultural communities, and The Monster in the Mountains, about the disappearance of 43 students in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. Both these projects, accompanied by short films, were published by The New Yorker. His work has appeared regularly in the US and international press, including Time magazine, The New YorkerLe Monde and Internazionale. He has been honored three times by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Prize. He received the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Award in 2015, and was named a senior fellow at the Emerson Collective. He was nominated to Magnum Photos in 2015, and became a full member in 2019.

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