| Photography and Storytelling: Thinking About the Photo Book

The perfect opportunity to dive deep into your photography, gain a comprehensive understanding of your projects and leave ready to start your photo book.

Imagine a triangle. At the top of this triangle is photography, on the bottom left is storytelling and on the bottom right is preparing to publish. In the center of this triangle is a photograph of your face, it’s you. You have just visualized the essential elements for producing a meaningful photography book: photography, storytelling, preparation, and you.

This workshop is designed for photographers who have a comprehensive body of work, and are ready to benefit from peer review and structured critique. The practical goals of this five-day intensive workshop are to leave with a comprehensive understanding of our own projects, starting points for further study (such as publishing houses and design), a strong sequence draft, and a statement ready to share. Importantly, we should leave this week feeling energized and excited, ready to climb the mountain which is thinking about the photo book.

Each day will be a balance of writing exercises, group critique, lectures, and moments to engage with our cameras and the local environment.

You will be asked to articulate what motivates your work, why you take photographs, and what you love about photography. Examining your photographic journey, where you started, where you are now, and where you see yourself in the future. 

Students will print and present 20 images from their body of work. These images will undergo class critique, giving each student the opportunity to experience how an uninformed audience is responding to the images, and what they see in the work. Students will then share their project statements, whether formalized or purely verbal. This exercise will allow us to experience the gap between the intention of the maker and the understanding of the viewer.

We will explore the context of our photographs; students will study their own work and the work of others, and discuss where they see these images within current photographic trends and/or photographic history.

We will go deep into the world of storytelling, what storytelling looks like in other narrative mediums, and examples of successful storytelling in photography. Photography allows for a broad understanding of ‘story’ and we will attempt to interpret meanings from both the most abstract to the most literal. This research will act as a primer, as we work to find the narrative threads in our own work. We will work on sequencing and project statements for critique.

Lectures will also cover many of the elements you can be thinking about as you prepare to publish your work, such as; looking at the different personalities of publishing houses, the different formats of photography books, photo book awards, timelines, budgets, text and design.

Finally, each day we will make time to take advantage of Maine in July bringing our cameras and a notebook out into the local environment with curated exercises to spark inspiration or cleanse the mind.

This is a workshop for photographers who are looking for a busy and productive week. As someone once said; the lucky photographer is the prepared photographer.

This workshop is also the perfect companion for the online course Planning Your Photography Book (Online).

All images copyright Madeleine Morlet.