I returned from Woodstock last night with a head full of new ideas and a renewed sense of direction. It will take me a week to process what I have learned this weekend, but that’s alright. The photographers who ran the workshop were Alex and Rebecca Norris Webb. I was very impressed–by both their work and their attitudes. There was none of the “famous photographer” feeling about them and I understood immediately that they work very hard at their craft and love it. It reminded me of the Lao-Tse quote about finding a job you love and never having to work a day in your life. I felt it through these two. Their work speaks for itself.
Through these workshops I am letting go of much I have done in the past few years. The images of the Roma that I have been carting about for a year-and-a-half are being shelved indefinitely. My work with them as “documentary” pieces is finished. What a relief. I have to find a new space in which to see the world, and by that I mean finding a new perspective. Alex’s eye has inspired me to see with a more searching heart and Rebecca’s from a fresher sense of the poetic nature that all visual circumstances embody. They really opened themselves up an revealed themselves as human beings in search of an explanation, a charecteristic of artists in every genre.
So I have learned to see the human body as a portrait through Tanya Marcuse; to use the photographic image as a “literary” thread from Mary Ellen Mark; and the build on this “literary” photographic story-telling by challenging my eye to see from a more immediate, layered and emotional point-of-view. That last one is from the Webbs, who, I feel, come to their art through compassion and a need for comprehension of their own place within the experience.
It’s all about people and intimacy for me. The document is two-dimensional, although necessary for my own exercise. Now I will search for something about the interior, without which the external image is merely a shell.
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