"Take Sean Kernan's class: if you are open to it you will be enriched. It's really not about photography. It's about receptiveness, understanding, expansion and challenge.
Take Sean Kernan's class if you are not open to it and you will be shaken up, irritated, annoyed and challenged. In either case it will be time well spent and changes in you will be made. After all isn't that what we're going for?"
Jay Maisel
For years I have been teaching a workshop for photographers that works directly with what happens before the photograph is taken.
What does that mean?
It is an unusual approach, and I arrived at it because I was not trained as a teacher (or even as a photographer), so when I was offered my first teaching job I had to figure things out from scratch.
It seemed to me, then and now, that to take a photograph you needed to be fully present, awake and alert enough to perceive absolutely everything that is around you including things that are not necessarily visible. Call it a state of creative awareness.
The class that has resulted from years of exploration and refining uses a number of exercises to take people to a greater presence and awareness at any given moment. It does so by setting aside the photo-making process and looking around us as broadly as possible. The exercises themselves are quite simple and rely on doing things that we all know how to do already.
At the end of the exercise the class returns to picture making, but the photographs are broader, deeper, more resonant, because the photographer is changed.
There was an important node in all this when I taught a class to the faculty at the Maine Media Workshops in the Summer of 08. Communication Arts ran an article about it in January, and you can read it here. Also, I recorded the opening talk of that class, and you can hear it here.
In class, photo: Jay Maisel
Schedule of upcoming classes and talks includes
AIGA CT Lecture in March
Possible 1-day workshop at the Jennifer Jane Gallery, New Haven
Creativity and the Photographer, Maine Media Workshop July 11-17, 2009
When our first creative photograph breaks through in our early work, it surprises us by completely transcending its subject and becoming something else entirely. The picture happens because we are really and fully awake … and we have no real idea how we got there. That's the mystery, and it is the reason we go on more deeply into photography.
Most photographers hope that such a flash of awareness will show up at the right time. But you don't have to wait for it to happen. There are ways to go looking for it, and you can learn them.
Over 25 years of teaching and studying, Sean has gathered a series of simple exercises that let us explore and deepen our creative state. Think of them as working on what happens before the click, where the real creative work is done. Applying the results of these exercises to daily photographic assignments and then talking about them gives us the chance to see, not what people think of out pictures, but how they actually affect people.
And as we expand our seeing and awareness, our pictures begin to change, a process that continues long after the class is over. This doesn't require extensive photographic accomplishment, (although you should command your camera and the necessary software, and not the other way around). You just need to set aside ideas, limitations and strengths, and take some new approaches. Awakeness and awareness in a strongly supportive group will be the week’s work, and we will look for it with our cameras, our bodies and our minds. We’ll work deep, wake up, and have fun and we'll prize audacious failures over small, safe successes. Participants should arrive ready to jump in!
Creativity and the Photographer, but More So, Maine Media Workshop July 18-22.doc
This workshop is about becoming the source of your own photographs.
The activities of the class bring us into the that timeless, dimensionless moment of creation where the real seeing that makes the photograph is done.
We do this by looking past photography, by setting aside the idea of “interesting subjects” in favor of being interesting photographers. We do this by manifesting out creativity in clear and observable ways.
Most of the exercises we use are similar to those in the Creativity and the Photographer workshop, but we use them in a more pointed an concentrated way. In addition to exercises, we focus on a week-long project that takes us beyond picture-taking and into the realms of conceptual art, sculpture, sound, writing…in other words, into making work from awareness and response and thought. This work can involve photography, but it can also extend into other media. The idea is to create and provoke experiences in both artist and viewer, and to learn how it was done.
Also, we will spend time on looking at some alternates to the critique for telling us how our work lands on viewers,
In the end the point of the workshop is to broaden the base of our photography by bringing us to a greater awareness of our perceptions, and doing so by direct experience.
Oh, and by the way, there’s a very good chance we might wind up with some great photographs. But the real point is to emerge with a basis for our own work.
Reviving the Professional Photographer, Maine Media Workshop, September 5-11,
Our pure early excitement with our early can get pushed aside when photography becomes our job. Five, ten or fifteen years later we find ourselves asking, Where did fun go? This workshop is about finding that fun and wonder, about recapturing that early excitement that drew you to it in the beginning. It lets us reconnect and revive.
When we turn professional, we shift from exploring our own vision to recreating someone else’s. That’s a huge shift and the vision was so exciting in the first place gets set aside. The good news is that the magic, passion and excitement that made us fall in love with photography in the first place stays alive, right there in us. It is just a matter of waking it up again.
This workshop does that by taking participants back to that personal creative working process, to creativity in its purest forms. Using a series of exercises that provoke presence and awareness, participants get out of their heads, onto their feet, and into their own present awareness. In this state one can make photographs that are alive, surprising and inspiring.
We’ll adress not only the “balancing act,” but more importantly the dovetail of personal and professional work through thought, practice, and imagemaking, and we’ll fashion some tools to take us to new vision. The rediscovery of passion, love and drive acts as a catalyst for work, for both the client and oneself. Once creativity is back in our hands, our choices expand.
This is not necessarily a class about accomplished photography. The real requirement is that one should be able to let go of our past ideas—particularly the ones that have worked—and be commit to a real exploration of seeing in the present.
To date I have taught workishops at:
New School/Parsons (New York),
Art Center (Pasadena),
International Center of Photography (New York),
Maine and Santa Fe Workshops,
University of Texas,
Austin Peay University (Tenn.),
F. Holland Day Foundation (Maine),
Wesleyan University,
Institute of Art (Atlanta)
Lehman College (New York)
In addition to teaching workshops I have been a speaker at various events, including Art Center, Pasadena, graduation; Rockport College, Maine, graduation; Case Editors Conference, Chicago; Governor's Academy, Massachussets; Williston Academy, Massachussets; the Townhouse Gallery, Cairo; ASMP Strictly Business, Los Angeles and Atlanta; Photo-Plus, New York.