Discussing her own projects and her unique path through photography, Tanya will share key insights, strategies and tools for participants to develop, sustain and publish their own personal and long-term projects.

The workshop will feature daily lectures from Tanya and a mix of short shooting assignments to be done at a near location in smaller groups, along with group editing and deconstruction/reconstruction of story/conceptual approaches to students’ personal projects.

Throughout the workshop, Tanya will discuss visual storytelling, photography as an intellectual pursuit, political photography as writing, and self liberation in new approaches to storytelling, docu-drama, finding the murky middle, creative non-fiction, photographers’ relationships with subjects, ethics, humor and personal vision. A key component will be the interdisciplinary approach, borrowing and merging practices from conceptual art, anthropology, theatre, diary writing,  and investigative journalism.

Saudi photographer Tasneem Alsultan, who's first earned fame for her wedding photography business and has grown into a well recognised and award winning photographer for her project 'Saudi Tales of Love', will be a guest speaker during the workshop to share her journey, her learnings and experience with you.

NOTE: Tanya would like to get to know you and your work a little, so she will be sending through some questions for you to respond to closer to the time of the workshop. 

Philosophy:

Be obsessed, utilize little love and little hate poems, and find the personal in your long term storytelling projects. Otherwise, what is the point? Liberate yourself from inane reductive titles (and liberate those whose story you tell/document) and approach photography as literature, theatre, anthropology, and investigative journalism.

Course Objectives:

To share key insights, strategies and tools for participants to develop, sustain and publish their own personal and long-term projects; to inspire and push participants to take a more expansive, creative view on documentary photography

Cauldron of inspiration:

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

“It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine - the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me.” 

―Raymond Carver

“If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we'll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, "created of warm blood and nerves" as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.”

―Raymond Carver, Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose

“Write what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?”

―Raymond Carver