Presented by Larry Fink

As photographers, we live in boxes. We perceive poetic and practical life in a box. We fit the world into the box in our hands, into the box at the end of the viewfinder. What do we leave in? What do we leave out? Can we make silence or sound fill the box? Can we make heartbreak fill the square? If a face strolls through our boxes, how do we capture it without smothering it? How do we live as photographers inside this box and yet live outside it as well? Our intuition knows the answers. Aligning your shooting and seeing with your intuition is to drop many preconceptions about what you think pictures are about and why they are made. When we look into our boxes, whose eyes are we really using? Are we seeing for ourselves or are we following the vision of photographers we admire?

The purpose of this course is to learn to trust yourself so that you are able to make pictures through emotional and physical responses to your subject. This should be the rule and not the afterthought. Being passionately alive within the moment is essential for any photographer. The root of the intuitive is the emotional heart. Kindness is its helper. And believe it or not in this cynical day, love is its liberty.

A student of mine once told me that “I make it feel like each good image is a moral victory.” Indeed it is. Anytime there is a discovery which involves the courage of the imagination, it adds to the perpetual revolution of the spirit. And in so far as that is, I am on the front lines of that vanguard. I invite you to join me in Charlottesville for a week of challenging discovery. Everything is open and nothing is relaxed. You will choose your subject matter. We will begin with a detailed portfolio review of each student’s work where I will attempt to find the path within each of your mysteries and try to help create an atmosphere of clarity. Then we will explore and we will shoot. The box will come alive. We are here to surprise each other and move forward. We will spend our hard-earned images on each other and wonder if we have the liberty to rejoice that we have oh-so-subtly learned more about what we see and how we see and what it looks like to feel.

Larry has been photographing for almost fifty-one years and teaching for forty-one. He has received two Guggenheim fellowships and two National Endowment for the Arts grants. He has had one-man exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A major retrospective of his work was on tour in Europe for almost ten years. A practitioner of the “snapshot aesthetic,” Larry Fink is catalogued with the esteemed ranks of Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand. In addition to his personal photography and his teaching, he has photographed for an international array of publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Rolling Stone and has shot ads for Adidas, Nike, Gucci, MasterCard, Cunard, and Chivas. As an influential educator, Larry has taught at the Yale University School of Art; Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture; Parsons School of Design; and the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. Since 1988 he has been a professor of photography at Bard College.