OR EDU

In this day and age, it is absolutely necessary to have a website that showcases your work as a photographer. The website should be easy to look through, and it should contain all the relevant information about your and about your work, plus, of course, examples of your work. If English is not your first language the website should allow visitors to see some English text so they know what they are looking at. The English text need not necessarily be perfect (even though that clearly would be good), but having no English text is a very bad choice.

So here's the assignment: If you do not have a website with your work, set up a website. A blog (and that also includes Livejournal) does NOT count as a website. You need a proper website, tied to your name (this means that if you do not have a domain name, you need to get one, too). You can integrate your blog into your website, as part of it, but the main part of the website should be your images, divided into the different projects.

If you do have a website, use this opportunity to get back to it and to look at whether you are really happy with it. Does it have some English text? Is it easy to use? Is the information on it still relevant or correct? Etc.

This assignment is not directly part of the workshop, but since a large part of my work as a blogger, writer and teacher is done online, I decided to bring this topic up.

Just to give you an example why a website is important: A while ago, I blogged about and did an interview with a photographer from Lebanon. If she had not had a website I would not have been able to do that. A little while later, someone working with the BBC saw the interview and contacted the photographer, to do a big documentary. Without the website this would not have happened this way. I have many more examples of how a website directly created jobs, assignments, exhibition opportunities etc.

To start things, we need to talk about your project outline. For this workshop, you need a project outline. Some of you have a proposal, some don't. If you don't have a proposal, now is the time to write one. If you do have a proposal it's time to go back to it and to carefully examine it and see whether there might be things missing.

Questions to think about and answer include:
1. What is the intention of the project?
2. Who is the audience?
3. What is the status of the project (has it been started already, if yes where do you stand?)?
4. What do you think is the overall time you need to finish the project (this needn't be too precise, but you need to have a ballpark idea)?
5. What other projects - by other photographers - address what you are doing, and how will your project be different?
6. What is the general cultural and political background of your project? Is there writing about the subject? Etc.

It is important to realize that you will refine and edit what you have as your project evolves. However, you need to have a solid basic project outline to get started.

At the end, your project outline will be distilled into the project statement - the text that will go along your images.

Portraits should be part of any project on economic hardships. It is true, the American housing crisis, for example, is about houses. But the real story are the people who bought houses that they could not afford or who got screwed over by their banks. Economic hardships mean that people suffer, and showing those people is important.

So taking portraits of people should be part of your project.

I set the deadline as Dec 31st, but obviously that's just because there has to be a deadline. It's not a real deadline. Shoot portraits as you go, I want to see them.

Using the word "token" might not be the best choice. Maybe you would call it "objects" or "things that can serve as symbols." But economic hardships often manifest themselves through objects, documents, ... that suddenly have special meaning. For example, this could be uniforms from jobs lost, mortgage contracts for houses lost, etc.

Look out for such objects and if you can photograph them (you might be able to combine this with portraits, but they can be separate photographs) if they exist for your project. What they are - and even if they exist at all - of course depends on your particular project.

I suppose it's pretty obvious why this is an important part for most - but not necessarily all - projects. Depending on the projects, there might be just one such landscape/cityscape (as some sort of establishing shot), or a whole series.

Wishing you all a very happy, healthy and successful New Year 2011 (with lots of great photos), and Happy Holidays for all of you who haven't had them, yet!

By now you should have a good selection of photographs, covering a range of "types" (see the different assignments). Of course, you will continue shooting, but to wrap up the workshop, the last task at hand is to create an edit that tells the story that you wanted to tell (as outlined in your project proposal).

Since your proposals are all a bit different, the mix of images from the different "types" will depend on your actual topic. Some topics might require more portraits, some more landscapes, etc. Your task now is to figure out how to combine which images and how to create text around it (depending on your proposal text might be optional, but you will need a short statement about the work in any case).

So look through all the photographs you have and create an edit of around 20 images. Create a short statement (which you can probably extract from your project proposal, but it also could be very different, based on what you learned while you shot the images), and present things here. If a sequence is important, figure out a way to sequence images (why does one image have to come before another one etc.).

If you plan to continue work on your project after the workshop you can treat this edit as a first, preliminary edit. You will change it later, when you have more images. It might also teach you something about images you might be missing etc.