David Alan Harvey Workshop, entry 20: Farewell to those I experienced the workshop with

In this series, I have covered the workshop as I experienced it. I have only showed you glimpses of the other ten photographers that went through it with me. In their own different ways, each went out and had experiences every bit as intense as mine. They were sometimes discouraged, sometimes elated, but they all had a love for photography, a belief in their own ability and the desire to make themselves better. Each persevered to succeed and complete their essays. Each essay went beyond the normal scope of what one would be normally be expected to accomplish in five days.

I came expecting some rivalries to develop among us, as that is what almost always happens when creative, ambitious, driven, people get together to pursue anything. Yet, if any rivalry developed, I did not detect it. All wanted to succeed, but all wanted everyone else to succeed as well. During the critiques, there were no mean nor snide remarks, but even criticism was delivered in supportive ways.

Although our social time together was pretty much limited to lunch breaks, a sense of camaradarie grew among us. I know that cynics will find all this hard to believe, but that's how it was.

I have told you about the artistry of Edite Haberman, talking here with Michael Lloyd Young and Tracie Williams. Hopefully you have seen her beautiful work of art in the class slideshow on the Hassidic community of Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood. It was a vastly different piece of work than was the essay on a Latin American slaughterhouse that she used to introduce herself to us at the beginning of the workshop.

Originally, she presented the slaughterhouse as photojournalism, but by the time David finished removing the ones he thought ought to go, what we saw was an artistic rendering of a slaughterhouse - at once horrific and beautiful.

Edite is a nightowl like me and on a couple of ocassions we have found ourselves shooting emails and photographs back and forth at 2:00 and 3:00 AM for me - 3:00 and 4:00 AM for her in San Francisco. She participated in a team documentation of San Francisco on winter solstice and recently finished hanging a solo show at the World Affairs Council, where she is slated to speak at the same podium where Madeline Albright and Barbara Boxer have spoken.

I have already written a fair amount about Zun Lee (here posing for Carolyn Beller) who I got to spend a bit more time with during the workshop than I did with anyone other than my apartment mates. Zun has also left a number of comments. Anyone who has followed this blog knows that as the workshop drew close to the end, I seemed to be irreversibly careening down Humiliation Road.

As I careened, I kept thinking that even if I did not pull out of it, then I could console myself with the knowledge that, without trying, I had encouraged Zun, who had been ready to back away from shooting his powerful essay on black fathers, until he saw my introduction essay on my own father.

On the final shooting night, Zun and I rode the subway together from Brooklyn to Manhattan. As we parted, he stated confidently that I was about to go out and shoot something good. I was not certain, but took confidence from his confidence.

His essay has caught a good amount of attention. He has built on it since returning to Toronto and has undertaken new projects as well. My gut feeling is that Zun is going to far as photographer.

In my entire series, I posted only one image that spoke to how painful the workshop experience can be when a photographer goes out, shoots her heart out, brings her images to class, feels she has little to show and then sees most of what she did show fail to survive the critique.

As we saw, Tracie Williams recovered strongly from that and produced an exceptional essay of flash portraits from Zuccotti Park and Occupy Wall Street.

She is still there, covering the movement. I received an email from her the other day. She said she had "been living some crazy ass nomadic Occupy lifestyle, which, needless to say is a bit unstable."

What we saw at the workshop was only the beginning of her essay. I look foward to seeing the completed work - in a book, I hope.

I have no idea what Isabela Eseverri has been up to since the workshop, or where she is. I did receive a note from her the other day, to give me her ok to run her work in the slideshow, but she did not say anything more than that. I checked her blog, but it has not been updated since September.

Her Latina essay was superb and sexy and so my hopes are high that, wherever she is, she is shooting something good.

Mark Bennington, whose essay caused us to wonder just what secrets are hidden behind the faces of beautiful women, has spent most of his time since the workshop in Mumbai, India, working on a book project he calls, Living the Dream - a documentary look at the world of Bollywood actors. He is currently back in the US, but he believes he will be back in Mumbai when I go to India for Sujitha's wedding to Manoj. The wedding will take place in Pune, about three hours from Mumbai and I will fly home from Mumbai.

We should get a chance to hang out.

Sarah Baker - I wrote about our post-midnight conversations at the apartment, and how she started out shooting a color essay on a black barbershop in the neighborhood of our apartment and then switched to black and white.

One night as we visited late, she showed me a certain lens she had and I don't even remember what she called it, but it did different kind of things with focus. She handed it to me and told me I could play with it and borrow it if I liked.

I shot exactly one frame with it and this is it.

Sarah is in Myanmar right now. I am not exactly certain what she is doing there, but she does want to be a travel photographer and she also works to combat the sexual slavery of children, so I suspect that whatever she is doing, it is good work to do.

I received a group email from Jen Zeil Klewitz (left) a couple of days ago. She just landed a job in the Kimberly region of the Australian Outback. "That's the far northwest corner," she wrote, "one of the world's last, untracked, great remaining wildernesses." She will be working with Aboriginal women. In the past, she spent three years there, so she is not a novice to the area or a stranger to the people.

"This will certainly open doors for me to work with indigenous people all over the world -- a lifelong dream of mine, and a door I've been waiting to open for me for a long time, combining my expedition/wilderness/conservation skills, documentary work, and art/dance/music background to help extraordinary people often overcoming extraordinarily difficult circumstances. I dream that this work specifically will continue to take me to Africa and back into Latin America."

She said the workshop "pushed me to 'dig deep' in a way I hadn't expected, and that experience for me yielded a lot of necessary clarity and focus about my path, my work, and my vision. Has been an interesting few months (re)shaping that vision...and voila!! All my paths have collided into a beautiful little gift of a new life Adventure."

When we spoke at the workshop, she had been planning to come to Nome later this year. Maybe that's out now. 

Don't worry - I've got a few sentences for Andy Kropa and Milli Apelgren coming up, too.

Carolyn Beller and I friended each other on Facebook - which pretty much the whole class has done - and she has stepped up to be a friend. She leaves me encouraging comments just about every day that her situation permits. It does not always permit - she just returned to her home in Chicago from a prolonged trip to India. She kept her camera in action and is posting the results day by day.

I just wish that she had stayed in India a little longer, so that maybe our paths could have crossed when I go there. What a kick that would have been, to get together with two of my workshop mates in India.

Uwe Schober is the one workshop mate that we worried about for a bit, as he disappeared for awhile. We worried that he had taken a David Alan Harvey critique a little too hard and personal, but if so, he rose above it - as you can see in the superb portraits that he did in the place he had disappeared into - Zucotti Park.

I do not know what he is doing now or if he is back home in Germany, but I did get this very short message from him just the other day:

"not much online these days and travelling quite a bit..."

Throughout my career, I have followed an almost hard-and-fast tenet that Andy Kropa, standing at left next to Sarah, has given me cause to rethink. So has David Alan Harvey. When doing photojournalism and documentary work, I never use flash. I always use available light - even when there is almost no light available. My rationale for this is that I want to depict things in the light that I find them, not in the light that I bring to the scene.

I took this picture on the stairway to the roof during the party that followed the final night's slideshow presentation. It is available light - and there was not much light available.

Earlier, I mentioned that Andy had taken a lighting workshop from David on the Saturday before the workshop began. The early critiques began with David starting out to scold Andy for messing up the off-camera flash lighting techniques that he had used at Occupy Wall Street - but suddenly David would stop - a brilliant picture, brilliantly lit, had appeared.

At one of those critiques, a picture came up of a pigeon walking on a sidewalk near the face of a sleeping Occupy protester. David stopped, and we all gazed at that picture. It was excellent, we all agreed. David marked it as a keeper. Then, the next picture popped up - the man still slept, but instead of the pigeon, three men in suits walked by, one after the other.

The image was stunning and one of things that made it stunning was the way Andy's light had struck the walking men and the sleeper. So David stopped and we talked about it for awhile. David then told Andy that it was going to have to be one image or the other - the pigeon or the men walking.

"I think I like the pigeon best," Andy said. "I'll go with the pigeon." This was clearly one of those cases that Sports Illustrated Photo Director Steve Fine had referred to when he said photographer's make their own worst editor.

Fortunately, David, and all of us rose up against that decision. It had to be the men walking.

Life Magazine agreed - they included that image in their special "Best of 2011" issue. Here is a picture of that image in Life along with a letter Andy wrote to David.

Since the workshop, Andy has been getting much work, including an assignment to cover the New Hampshire primary debate.

As for me, I told myself I would undertake regular flash lighting exercises - but I haven't. I have continued to shoot all available light, except for Aurora's wedding. It's just a feeling I have. I like to shoot things in the light in which they present themselves to me. Maybe tomorrow I will grow out of it. Maybe I never will. But Andy's got me thinking about it.

I will close with the final scene I shot at the workshop. We had returned momentarily to the Loft after sharing lunch together on the day after our presentation. It is Milli Apelgren - who felt so distanced from the "cool people" in high school that she shot her Loft essay on cool people in New York City. Whenever I visited Milli, I found her to be extremely cool - and the photos in her essay, Entangled, are all cool.

Milli is back home in Austin, Texas, doing her work at the Blanton Museum of Art of the University of Texas at Austin.

We parted company right after she waved this goodbye in the little graffiti-covered shack atop the building that houses the loft. I have not seen her, or any of my workshop mates since - but I sense them every day.

I have one more post to go in this series. I will begin work on it as soon as I post this, but, given the hour and the fact that I feel I should leave this post at the top of the page for awhile, I think I will wait until tomorrow afternoon to post it.

Comments

[curiouser]

I see added light--your light--in all your photos.

[Logbook - Wasilla - Beyond]

Thank you, Curiouser. I don't necessarily feel that way, but I am glad you see it like that.