Raymond Meeks

“The Vertical Plane” 

Attendees of this 5-day workshop will participate in a daily practice of photographing at a single location. This predetermined site has been chosen because of its lack of apparent features, a place that on first glance might appear to be void of subject matter.  This being the case, the subject, perhaps, becomes you. Each of us with our individual and particular sensibilities, idiosyncrasies, and a corresponding emotional or psychic response that activates a particular relationship between seeing and photographing. A similar working method will be applied to editing, as we process raw files and begin to shape our images.

Ray will share his workflow for applying craft to express an image, inviting intervention and recovery, extending opportunities for chance operations into the editing process.  Along with our daily building of an archive, we’ll be attuned to what’s beginning to surface throughout the interactions with our pictures. As well as how images form a compounding energy and transform one another. We will focus, specifically, on the questioning of what wants to be expressed through this work. What form does this work want to take? What will the final piece look and feel like, as an object?

The imperative behind working along a vertical plane lies in the commitment to one’s particular tendencies, their curiosities and obsessions, and applying this charge to exploring a given place over time. The primary variable, aside from evolving conditions such as light and atmosphere, is the maker’s mental, emotional and, perhaps, psychic state, in a sustained response to place. To explore the ways in which a place will uniquely offer itself when one is invested in understanding what lies beyond the superficial. How this transforms what is seen and how one uses the camera.

Participants of this workshop can expect to complete a new body of work and, perhaps, a blueprint for a new way of visually engaging and making pictures. In order to create and respond with immediacy, we’ll need to work with digital cameras and raw files.  Ideally, each participant will have access to a laptop and Adobe Creative Suite or other editing applications. We’ll be applying a daily practice or journaling and incorporating our pictures alongside text.