Participants & final works 2015
The workshop incorporated elements of photography, text, drawing and the audiovisual, looking at how the blending of such elements has different consequences than working only with photographs. Each student created a narrative story about the local environment - something they experienced or observed during their time in the workshop.
Maria Kapajeva (EE/UK):
When making a portrait, we have a rare opportunity to unabashedly gaze into someone else’s world – be it a loved one or a stranger – at times anonymously, at other times with the complicity of the portrayed. This workshop explored portraiture in its many forms, with an emphasis on the use of portraiture within a narrative.
The students researched, explored and considered the relationships between humans and nature in the local area of Kuldīga. They sought out people who were willing to share their stories about the nature that surrounds them and interpreted the stories visually, perhaps revealing something about our human nature today.
STORK - "Human Nature" workshop result as book layout:
How do we define a landscape? Is it something we can distance ourselves from? The lens inevitably puts us in the center of everything we see, and thus makes observing a landscape a narcissistic act of observing oneself within it. The workshop used landscape as a starting point, a theme to be interpreted and expressed by a variety of artistic means.
The phenomenon of Camera Obscura (or dark chamber), when the outside scenery is reflected in a dark room through a small hole, has been known since long before the invention of photography in 1827. During the workshop students built a Camera Obscura and created a series of photographs with their own unique handmade pinhole cameras.
Every photobook is a self-contained universe with its own set of rules - editing, sequencing, design and choice of materials are all opportunities to add new layers of meaning to a body of work. The aim of this Crash Course was to build a book dummy, covering all the steps of the process through knowledge, creativity and chance.
Here are the book dummies made by the participants:
Participants:
Abdi Yacine Benseddik (France/IT)
Alex Stoyanov (Ukraine)
Anastasia Markelova (Russia)
Andrejs Strokins (Latvia)
Bahar Habibi (Canada)
Bärbel Praun (Germany)
Camilla Pongiglione (Italy/FR)
Ekaterina Anokhina (Russia)
Flaminia Celata (Italy)
Ieva Raudsepa (Latvia)
Iona Sherwood (UK)
Roman Drits (Latvia/DE)
Tatyana Palyga (Russia/FR)
This workshop, led by Vincen Beeckman (BE) and Viktorija Eksta (LV) was specially designed for teenagers from Pelči and Kuldīga district. The participants learned the basics of photography and visual storytelling and went on an Into The Wild hiking trip, creating art based on the participants’ dreams and surrounding environment.
