Image & Text Masterclass

This 5 day workshop is designed to assist attendees in finding a voice for their images. This skill is useful for presenting and selling work to galleries, publishers, audiences, and institutions, whether you're giving a talk, writing a grant proposal, or trying to create a photographic narrative.

“Photographs are spectacular crutches for writers, and excellent tools for summoning (or inventing) memories, exploring points of views, and collecting descriptive details. All my life I've approached photography through the dog door of literature--poetry, fiction, memoir, screenplay, travel narrative, and I now spent a lot of time thinking about how many words a photograph is really worth. All the ways words swarm and take shape around a photograph or photography project. As much as many photographers resist the notion, words are the language viewers use to translate photographs, and to animate them, to get them moving in a recognizable world or context; the critical and interpretive discussion and attempts to understand photography require words; the mind instinctively attempts to construct a narrative, whether one exists or not. Or, at the very least, a constellation of feelings and emotions.

Attendees will talk about unlocking the words in a photograph--the voices, histories, music, and stories. We'll look at your photos (and those of others) and try to figure out what they're trying to say. We'll talk about all the ways text in a photobook--epigraphs, critical essays, oral history, project background, jacket copy, and archival documents--influence our 'reading' of and response to the work. We'll also talk about the history of images and text, and how over time words--essays, criticism, word of mouth--have shaped our 'understanding' of some of the seminal photographic works and photobooks. I'll ask you to try to write a photograph, to attempt to create with nothing but words a photo you love, and to try to translate some of your own work into words, to hear its voice. We'll also talk a lot about storytelling, points of view, and the confluence of photography, film, music, and literature, with the goal of trying to make photographs find--and use--their words.”