I'm rescheduling our workshop, The Photograph Within, for early June.
The new version will have more review time, and new performance enhancement techniques from Robin. If you're new to this, The Photograph Within is a workshop on connection and attunement, namely, how to recognize your body's signals and quickly get into the zone of creative flow.
Details as we figure them out.
We're doing it again next month. Here are the particulars of our workshop, The Photograph Within.
Date: Sunday April 13, 2008, 10am to 5pm.
Location: Our house, NE Seattle, details upon registration.
Cost: $75.
Leaders: Doug Plummer and Robin Shapiro
Size: 10 participants.
To register: email me.
Description: Doug Plummer, photographer, and Robin Shapiro, LICSW, psychotherapist, assist photographers to find their optimum creative zone for personal or commercial shooting. Doug brings his experience and the art theory components. Robin brings Focusing, EMDR, and Performance Enhancement techniques. Together, they help photographers find and refine the neural pathways to their internal and external photographs.
We will teach you to be alert to those physical sensations that let you know you are in the “zone”, and to respond to the world from a deep and fast place. We will talk about process and neurobiology, and use exercises to deepen your awareness of your own particular cues. We want you to get deeply familiar with that arrangement of reality in the viewfinder that “you cannot ignore”.
Bring a camera (and a laptop if you shoot digital). The workshop has been revised and improved since the first round in January. Alumni of the first one get in for half price.
I had so much worry going into this workshop. The previous night was full of dreams that were only about anxiety: we were meeting in a huge hayfield, and nobody could hear me. Then we were meeting in a rental studio, but the music was loud in the next room and someone was welding, and the owner of the studio wouldn't acknowledge that I had rented the place and had a right to it.
I think I still need to own the role of teacher and mentor.
Nonetheless, the reviews have been stellar. It seems to have been a useful day for everyone. Yet we both see a lot we want to change.
The idea behind our workshop is this: to do deep work as a photographer requires an ability and a means to connect with one's self and one's surroundings. There are performance enhancement tools that can make it possible to do so with intention.
My experience as a workshop participant has been that the strongest ones are those in which the group coheres by deep mutual sharing of their process and their work. Sam Abell is my mentor and model for the best kind of leader. He has a ninjalike way of not appearing to do very much, yet I am still in touch with some of my workshop mates from a decade ago, and I am still working out some of the insights from those sessions.
A one day workshop is not going to present those kind of opportunities. But I want to start modestly, and understand the dynamic of presenting a way of photographic working style that can be quickly assimilated. Here is how the next workshop will be different.
--More shooting. Less time to do it in. We had a long lunch/shooting break, but it broke the focus of the group. The 15 minute session in the morning seemed more successful.
--More me, less Robin. Yes, I think my wife is wonderful and the smartest person I know, but she admits that she's more used to teaching discrete skills to therapists, not artistic process to artists. What she brings to the table is unique. Yet I need to find my voice, and use it.
--Trusting the group to make the workshop a workshop, and stay out of the way when necessary. We had some really great talent in our group. Anyone deep enough into their own process to be interested in our workshop is already going to know how to get into their groove. We don't need to replace what anyone has that already works, just extend it a little bit and make it easier to access.
The next run of The Photograph Within will be in about six weeks. Alumni get in half price.
Read Robin's take on the day at her blog. And a participant already has us up on his blog.
Robin has another book contract with W.W. Norton. She writes books for therapists, outlining clinical protocols to use for various populations. It means I'll be in charge of dinner, dishes, and computer administration for the next year.
This book is going to cover depression, eating disorders and performance. Really, there's no common thread or sequence there. Under the performance enhancement section she has a chapter titled, “EMDR And The Artistic Zone: A Workshop For Photographers.”
The idea is this: working in the “Zone”, in performance parlance, means being fully immersed in the moment and in the creative process. In photography it means that interval of total connection with your surroundings, and being fully engaged in the act of seeing and capturing. Our premise is that Zone can be intentionally summoned. We have the power to go there when we want.
Now, Robin and I have been talking about doing a workshop together for some time. I know the creative and technical side. Robin knows all the brain stuff that's going on, and has the techniques. I'm the right brain—she's the left. We've even written it out. We just haven't actually done a workshop with this material yet.
We need your help writing the chapter. We need to workshop the workshop, run it a few times, then write it up for the book. So, all you Seattle area readers—wanna try out our workshop? Our only prerequisite is a working fluency with your camera.
Write me and tell me if you're interested. I'd like to put something together for late January, probably the 27th.
In preparing for next weekend’s workshop (The Photograph Within, at Newspace Photo Center in Portland), I’ve been thinking about process a lot. I’ve been reading about it, I’ve been writing about it, I’ve been obsessing about it. I’ve been cramming for the exam. It’s affecting how I photograph.
We’re on Gabriola Island, off Vancouver Island, visiting a friend. We’re at a rocky beach that has amazing eroded forms in the sandstone. I’m a sucker for these places, even though this is a well trod convention in West Coast landscape photography, and the vein is pretty well played out at this point. One does not easily make an original statement from these environs. Nonetheless, I still get excited at these spots and whack away at them with glee.
But this time, I’m self conscious of my process. Here’s a Weston beach shot, here’s a Wynn Bullock, here’s a little Minor White thing going on. I just need a 4x5 camera and a bunch of film holders (black and white, of course) to complete the image. “Actually, I just need a lithe, nude female body to completely conform to stereotype,” I say to my companions.
“No!” says Robin. April adds, “I wouldn’t want to keep you stuck in a stereotype.”
“OK Doug, let’s do it,” says Robin. Nudity, I think hopefully? “Let’s start the workshop.” Oh, that. “Close your eyes,” she says. “What do you feel?” I’m sensing things. The hot sun on my forehead. The cool ocean breeze. The smell of the salty air. The hum of the distant ferry. “Think of a time when you were in the zone. When everything was flowing. Maybe it’s a beach in California.” I go in my mind to a fog shrouded beach on the Olympic Peninsula, which had the best brushy edge to it. I worked it for an hour. “Are you there? Good. Open your eyes.”
Blue. Everything was blue, the sky, the ocean, the water. The rocks were brown, everything and every sense was heightened in intensity. “Are you here?” Yes, I’m here.
Two full cards later, I join April and Robin in the shade. I feel spent, but I’m still gazing at everything around me, at the back lit blades of grass on the hill, at the rocks beneath my feet, at the tugboat and barge offshore. “Your eyes are on,” Robin says to me.
Recent Comments