1. Community Is Key

Keeping my groups to just seven students means that everyone gets to know each other well — and when that happens, sharing vision, insights, and discoveries comes naturally. That sense of community builds just as easily in the field while we’re photographing together as it does over a glass of wine after the light fades.

I’ve found that this environment is fertile ground for restoring creativity and building a new foundation for our creative lives. There’s something that happens when a small group of photographers is fully present in a place together — a kind of collective seeing that wouldn’t happen any other way.

2. Slow Is Good

The pace of Italian life tends to be slow — or at least slower than what most of us put ourselves through every day back home. And slowing down means we get to see more.

Many travelers try to cover so much ground in a day that they never really get a sense of where they are or what it actually feels like to be there. The itineraries I set for these workshops deliberately leave time for wandering, contemplating, and exploring — time to think about what our photographs mean and how they communicate that meaning. Slowing down, I’ve come to believe, is one of the essential keys to making great photographs.

3. Immersion Creates Intensity

These workshops are built around the idea of immersion — in photography and in Italy simultaneously — and what that immersion produces is an intensity of experience that’s hard to replicate any other way.

Your camera is in hand every waking moment. Because we base all of the workshops in towns and cities, with frequent trips into the countryside, Italian culture is literally at our doorstep. We’re not observing Italy from a distance. We’re inside it, living inside it, making photographs from inside it.

We live photography while we are living in Italy. That’s not a tagline — it’s simply what happens.

4. Storytelling Creates Focus

One of the things I work hardest on with workshop participants is getting them to think in terms of story when they make their photographs. When that shift happens — and it usually does, often partway through the first full day — the photographs get better, clearer, and more personal almost immediately.

Together we use our cameras to build stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end. That focus changes everything about the quality of the images my workshoppers make.

5. The Classroom Is Everywhere

I have taught photography for more than 40 years, and for most of that time my classroom had desks and chairs and a door that closed at the end of the period.

In Italy, my classroom is everywhere — in a hill town at dusk, in a vineyard at midday, at the breakfast table, on a street corner where the light is doing something extraordinary. Workshop participants get to experience the complete cycle: make photographs, look at those photographs together, then go back out and make more — informed now by the experience of looking, critiquing, and being guided.

That cycle, repeated daily in one of the most photographically rich places on earth, is what makes these workshops work.

The post 5 Essential Italy Photography Tips first appeared on PhotographItaly.

• Alisdair
•  Amanda
• Ann Marie
• Gerald
• Gilly
• Kathryn
• Shirley

The post 2019 Cortona Photo Workshop – Student Slideshows first appeared on PhotographItaly.

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The Devil’s Bridge – Near Barga, Tuscany Lucca – Our Home Base for the Week Lucca – Our Home Base for the Week

Come Photograph & Explore Tuscany With Me: Click Below to Learn More About The 2017 Workshop:

Tuscany: Exploring The Eternal Moment

Only 3 Spaces Left – Click Here to Learn More

The post Tuscany – Video Postcards from the 2017 Workshop Locations first appeared on PhotographItaly.

When I read the quote above by the writer Rebecca Solnit, I immediately thought about a primary goal I have for my Italy Photography Workshop students:

Tell Your Story

Many people go to Italy and make photographs of what they see there. My workshops take you to the next level, teaching you how to be a storyteller with photographs. So, rather than returning with a folder of random images, you will create a set of images that tell a story – your story – about what you see, feel and respond to, creating a personal response for your time in Italy. I will push you to go beyond picturesque, postcard images and help you tell your own story about these amazing Italian places.

A few spaces remain for my 2017 Italy workshops – click below for more information.

The post Your Italy, Your Photographs, Your Story first appeared on PhotographItaly.

“What’s your story? It’s all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.

Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller’s art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.” – Rebecca Solnit

When I read the quote above by the writer Rebecca Solnit, I immediately thought about a primary goal I have for my Italy Photography Workshop students:

Story

Many people go to Italy and many of them make photographs of what they see there. My workshops take students to the next level, teaching them how to be storytellers with photographs. So, rather than returning with a random set of images, my students create a set of images that tell a story – their story – about what they see, feel and respond to, creating a personal response for their time in Italy. My goal for my students is to push them to go beyond picturesque, postcard images and help them tell their own stories about these amazing Italian places.

A few spaces remain for my June, 2016 Italy workshops and registration is closing soon; click below for more information:

• In Search of the Personal: Photographing Southern Tuscany – June 11 to June 18
• Your Story of Rome – June 6 to June 11
• The Story of the South: Photographing Puglia – June 19 to June 27

Questions or more information? Call Jeff at 630.202.3635 or email jeff@jeffcurto.com

The post Your Italy, Your Photographs, Your Story first appeared on PhotographItaly.