Course Updates

image: Bud Parr

My curriculum has been a combination of:

Daily practice (photographing/editing/printing+darkroom)
Reading and study (particularly spending time with photobooks)
Attending exhibits and talks, and finally
course work

I’ve found attending classes invaluable, not always for the content of the class, but for the discipline and interactions they’ve prompted. I find them invigorating and am gearing up for more soon. Taking this approach isn’t necessary for everyone, but I’ve found that I’ve developed a great more confidence than if I stopped at daily practice alone.

So here’s the update:

I just finished my fourth course at the International Center for Photography (ICP). So far, I’ve taken the following courses or workshops there:

Black & White Film Portraiture
Digital Negatives and Platinum-Palladium Printing
Concerning the Spiritual in Photography
Crit Lab: with D’Angelo Lovell Williams

Additionally, I’ve taken part in (viewed/listened/studied) two Magnum courses, which I should write about sometime. And, I participated in a set of lectures with Stephen Shore over Zoom:

Stephen Shore Masterclass
From May 12 to 16, 2025
Jeu De Paume – Paris

What is a photograph and how do we perceive it? This series of four lectures will explore the formal attributes of a photograph – how the world is translated, transformed into a photograph. They will explore the formal tools of that transformation and how those tools implement and require the imposition of structure. Finally, the lectures will describe the cognitive understanding of the image. This series begins with what a photograph is physical and formally and ends with how we ultimately receive the image

Lecture 1: The Nature of Photographs.
“A photograph is not what was photographed. It’s something else.” (Winogrand).

Lecture 2: Form and pressure
Photography as an analytic medium: The relationship of form to content.

Lecture 3: Attention
Experiencing the world: Paying attention to the mundane.

Lecture 4: The Mental Level.
The level on which we ultimately experience a photograph.

I think my next classes will have to do with longer-term projects and book making. I’m also interested in more hands-on darkroom work as I’ve been working on creating digital negatives for silver gelatin and platinum palladium printing. Digital negatives can get very technical!