WORKSHOP PURPOSE
- To heighten your sensory experience of the physical and emotional aspects of the city, and reveal what’s really there.
- To develop a relationship with the neighborhood that surrounds you.
- To connect people together within a one block radius area of your neighborhood.
- To use photography as a form of interaction with and communication about a place.
- To interact with daily technology [your smartphone] in another way; to more physically engage with your surroundings.
OUTCOMES
- Sharpen your photography skills in relation to taking photos of places, and capturing a ‘sense of place’.
- Deepen your relationship to your surrounding neighborhood. This leads to a deeper understanding of your city, and civic engagement is fostered. The more a place is experienced, the more people care about it.
- Cultivate team building, as workshops are designed to create meaningful interactions between participants.
- Boost productivity, as it’s been proven that productivity increases when people take breaks from their computers and go outside.
PROCESS
This workshop is for those that want to learn how to take photos that really capture the essence of a particular place. The workshop will start with a series of short exercises to connect each student with the focused area in a larger way – then we will be focus on taking photos that breaks down the neighborhood into art properties; such as line, form, juxtaposition. During this workshop, participants will shoot their surrounding neighborhood with an expanded experience with ‘place’. At the end of the workshop, every student will discuss/upload three photographs they took– and why it especially reflects the ‘sense of place’ of your surrounding neighborhood. The discussion will focus on each participant heightening an understanding of their own photographic processes – in relation to ‘place’. The group will then send their photos to senseofplace LAB to form a ‘sense of place’ map of the area.
GROUP INFO
This project can be adapted for any type/age of group to participate in. All workshops are individually tailored to each group. A group consists of 1 minimum and 10 maximum people.
LOCATION
This workshop meets at a location you decide upon and focuses on the surrounding radius of the meeting point.
PRICE
$25 per person. You can a also make a tax-deductible donation.
FACILITATOR
Laurie Halsey Brown is the Director of senseofplace LAB. She is an award-winning interdisciplinary and community-oriented artist that has created projects and exhibited internationally. She also has many years of teaching and education administration experience. After receiving her MFA from Cal Arts, she taught as a museum educator in many NYC museums, including the Guggenheim and the Whitney Museum of Art for several years. She then worked as the Education Director at several arts spaces including Art in General and Harvestworks Digital Media Arts, followed by a position as the Media Education Coordinator for the New Museum of Contemporary Art. She was a faculty member of the New School University, NYC from 1999 to 2012, where she designed and taught an online course titled ‘Interdisciplinary Media and Contemporary Society. Since moving to San Francisco, she has designed and taught several photo-based workshops through SkillShare, and was the Program Director for Art With Elders in 2012.