Vision & Discovery

Explore the creative possibilities of people, spaces, and objects in black and white.

© Emily Schiffer

Discover new possibilities! This course will expand your visual interests and add new energy to your work in digital B&W. Inspiration and knowledge is derived from lectures that examine the work of major photographers in specific fields, providing a context for each day's work. Discussions cover theory, history, and technical concerns. Afternoons are spent working in the field on specific assignments, each designed to awaken your eye and strengthen your ability to deal effectively with new subject matter in a highly personal way. 

Subjects covered during the week:

First Day: Spaces - The afternoon is spent photographing spaces, capturing the corner of a room, photographing a farmyard, backyard or porch.

Second Day: The Landscape - We work on rural and urban landscapes, photographing seascapes and horizons to create three-dimensionality with the foreground, middle-ground and background.

Third Day: Objects - This day we photograph things, an object's integrity, essence and its place as defined by the space around it.

Fourth Day: The Portrait - We are concerned with exploring ways to photograph people: friends, strangers, groups of people, even ourselves.

© Emily SchifferFifth Day: The Emotional Photograph - This assignment is to produce a single, complex photograph which expresses an emotion, concept or idea.

Final Day: Saturday morning is a final review of the week's work, with an assessment of each participant's progress, new ground broken, discoveries made and the direction in which each student will leave Rockport.

Mornings are filled with review and critique of the previous day's photographs. Lectures and discussions present new ideas and explore the way other photographers have handled specific subject matter. 

Students are encouraged to bring a laptop for image processing and editing since this is not a based in a digital lab classroom.

 

Instructors

Emily Schiffer

© Emily SchifferEmily Schiffer is a documentary photographer interested in depicting essential details of life that are often overshadowed by larger, more newsworthy circumstances. In 2005, she founded the My Viewpoint Youth Photography Initiative on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota, where she continues to teach and shoot. In 2011, she co-created See Potential, a community engagement/ public art photography project on Chicago’s South Side, which mobilizes residents to see potential in their community and create social change. Awards include: a 2013 Open Society Foundation Audience Engagement Grant, a 2011 Emergency Fund Grant from the Magnum Foundation, the 2010 Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Portraiture, the 2010 winner of the PDN Photo Annual Personal Project Category, the 2009 Inge Morath Award, presented by Magnum Photos and the Inge Morath Foundation, and a 2006-2007 Fulbright Fellowship in Photography. Emily has exhibited her photographs internationally. Publications include: Smithsonian Magazine, Photo District News, TIME Magazine Lightbox, Mother Jones, and BURN Magazine. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Farnsworth Museum, US, The Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, Japan, Foto Baryo, Philippines, and The Center for Fine Art Photography, US.  Emily received her BA in Fine Art and African American Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. For more information please visit www.emilyschiffer.com

http://www.emilyschiffer.com/

Deanna Witman

Deanna Witman is a fine art photographer living and working on the coast of Maine. She holds a M.F.A in Photography from Maine Media College and a B.S. Degree in Environmental Biology from Kutztown University.

Trained as both artist and scientist, she searches for metaphysical understanding and meaning amongst the rocks and trees. Through her own dictionary of myth and metaphor, she takes us into a realm which is at once both ephemeral and memorial. Timeless, in bared skin, primordial- she hopes the camera captures a glimpse of the soul.

She chooses to work with the pinhole camera because of it's capacity to capture time as she sees it, or more specifically how she experiences it, with its inherent dualities. The exposures range from a mere second to many minutes- both equally valid of what a moment can be. Moving the shim across the pinhole to allow the light in, for the moment to record on the film has become ritual. Metamorphosis is a frequent consequence of the temporal aspect of her process, slowly unexpected forms emerge, un/becoming- figures in the work suggest ephemeral states and exists within primordial realms.

The photographs are obsessively sought and exist privately in the longing to communicate intrinsic thoughts and experiences. A measure of existence, a rhythm with the Earth's breath, a communion with the crust of dead leaves and soil that give life and shape to her imagination and being.

These images were created in camera with one negative exposed using a large format pinhole camera. The images are hand printed in sliver halide on fiber paper and toned. Ten prints are made from each negative. All images are untitled, accompanied by the year the corresponding negative was created.

Deanna teaches photography at Maine Media Workshops, Rockport, Maine, the Farnsworth Art Museum, and Project Basho, Philadelphia. Her work has been published and exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in many private collections.