As we’re getting very near the close of this year and our first decade of the new millennium, I’m looking ahead to our goals for the next one. But really more to the point, I’ve been looking over how much I’ve had the good fortune to learn as the host of my show now named Advancing Your Photography.
As a side note, you have no idea how hard it is to edit some of our interviews down to the short segments that we publish. I’m there with each guest, soaking in perhaps an hour or two of data and need to whittle it down to about 10 minutes or less. In addition, I’ve had several conversations with each guest, often a tour of their studio and their work and come away with a healthy plate of material to noodle on.
I keep pondering how to bring more of this information to you, and even more importantly, ways we can leverage what we already have out there. This has brought me to the realization that we need to start a new photography school for Advancing Your Photography— from whatever level, onto the next and the next…
From my own experience at the San Francisco Art Institute (BTW, never did graduate from) and my talk with Annie Leibovitz about this last year, I’d say offhand that these are the essential ingredients of a photography school:
1. Instructors who know their business and can speak from experience and who can pass along, technical, compositional and even philosophical information that opens students’ eyes and help them to advance.
2. Being exposed to the work of other students—as with sports, you learn by watching how others do it, along with a healthy competition built into the process. Annie talked about her experiences in the darkroom where her photos were in the wash along with other students, for everyone to see, and you naturally wanted them to be good.
3. Being critiqued. This is can be a sweet and sour proposition as not all critiquing is positive (meaning effective in helping one advance) by a long shot. I believe that opinions should be left out of it—including “nice shot” “wow” or “that’s just terrible” and my favorite “WHY did you take that photograph?” (with a condescending tone flavored into it.) Critiques that cause you to look at your process and how you might improve your images are valuable.
4. Along with 1. above, constantly being exposed to other accomplished artists and learning from them.
5. Add to that the somewhat intangible quality of gaining a professional attitude, which hopefully is nurtured in the process of the above.
And of course, added to all the above, taking a boatload of photographs to develop your own style and voice.
I’m sure I left out many other factors, but the above boils down to:
1. Learning from other accomplished photographers (instructors, guests and students alike.)
2. Effective critiquing.
3. Easy access to the knowledge-base of the school as well as to its members.
4. An environment that both educates and inspires and opens up communication.
5. Mix in some healthy competition in the form of contests.
This is the direction we’ll be going with in the new year and the new decade with ADVANCING YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY. I’ll roll out the specifics of how we will accomplish these points, but for now our general plan is to create an online learning center (as well as real world seminars, photowalks, etc) that incorporates the above.
I would love to hear from you how this strikes you, if you’d like to participate and how you would like to advance your photography. And may I say happy Thanksgiving to you and yours…