A serious and demanding season-long exploration and practice of creating visionary photographic expression for ourselves and for others.

There are no available registration dates at this time.

Note: This Class will meet in a live, online format using the Zoom Platform
Class meets for 10 Mondays, Feb 26-Apr 29 from 10:30am-1:30pm ET.

We mostly begin our photography in an open and almost child-like state, not trying at all to express anything, happy enough if an image even coheres. And we surprise ourselves by making some photographs we can’t imagine having taken.

Then we start looking for “good photographs.”

And then we become Photographers.

This class is our chance to go back to the freshness of our beginnings but in a more conscious way. It will use whatever skills and knowledge we have learned while turning us back toward a kind of unconstructed awareness.

We’ll begin with some excursions that look beyond picture-making, out to perception itself. We’ll investigate experientially how awareness works, and then we’ll use it over a 10-week course to make work in forms that may be as varied as words, marks, sound, and installation. We’ll also look briefly at some of the neuroscience of perception. And we’ll integrate what we uncover into our photography through an extended project.

The idea is not so much to make what we already do better but to set aside our notions of seeing and thinking, and go after work that seeks ways to make our perceptions real, first for ourselves and then for others. In the end, we are after photos that don’t affirm what we already know but that surprise us with more.

In the course of things, you’ll do a study/presentation on an artist (photographic or other), and we’ll likely do some work in some form of expression other than photography.

We’ll embrace the unfamiliar and cross our threshold to places we seldom go. And we won’t let subject or photography do the lifting, we’ll do it ourselves.

Unlike a short-term workshop that can give us unsecured insights, meeting once a week for 10 weeks will give us the chance to fulfill what arises from the insights and expansions of attitude that might arise from the class itself.

If you have questions or want to talk about the workshop, email [email protected]

All images ©Sean Kernan

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Instructor: Sean Kernan

Sean Kernan is a widely-exhibited photographer, writer, film maker and teacher, and has focused deeply on an exploration of creativity in our photography and lives. He is the author of The Secret Books (with Jorge Luis Borges), Among Trees (with Anthony Doerr), Darrell Petit: In Stone, and Looking Into the Light, which explores creativity and photography. In recent years he has made several award-winning films: Crow Stories, The Kampala Boxing Club, A Mind of Winter, and The Visitor. His photography has been exhibited and published in France, Mexico, Egypt, Greece, China, Italy, Switzerland, Iran, Korea, and across the U.S. He has also collaborated with the dance company of choreographer Alison Chase on a theater/dance/multimedia work, Drowned that premiered at MASS MoCA. Clients include AT&T, Knoll, GE, Pratt and Whitney, New York Times, Smithsonian, Bloomberg, Harvard. He has taught and lectured at the New School/Parsons, Art Center Pasadena, Yale Medical School, ICP, and the University of Texas, and he has written for Communication Arts, Lenswork, and Graphis.

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