09.14.09
Penland, Week 2
My second week at Penland was indeed lots different from the first week.
I had the chance to really get to know the students, their work, and personally, from spending huge amounts of time in different situations together. We took a road trip to Asheville on Tuesday, and the students really put everything they’d learned to work, creating lots of images that they spent the last few days printing. They worked super-hard, and I kept throwing more information at them, mentioning matting and framing in the home stretch, which all of them tried to do for works in the auction and show ‘n’ tell.
I think the magic of Penland is in that second week. I can’t speak for all of the classes – the pace is completely different for clay, for example, which stops work and spends the last several day firing. But in the photo lab, everyone was off and running with everything they’d learned, turning out awesome prints, and getting into some advanced dodging and burning techniques, when a few days before they didn’t know what fixer is. Just amazing! Even getting frustrated that they couldn’t get this or that print (from horrible Holga negatives) perfect, I had to remind them that these things take time to master, and that they all were doing incredibly well.
Stretching the Holga’s range in the studio, and photographing art swiped from the clay studio
One student declared that he was going to make a 10 print portfolio, which seemed kind of crazy to me, but he took images he’d shot on Tuesday, stayed up pretty much all Tuesday and Wednesday nights, then learned matting, and hung a beautiful display of 10 matted prints on Friday – just amazing! That’s really the way to take advantage of a place like this.
Saul’s display at the Show ‘n’ Tell – see other students’ displays here
I also got much more of a chance to visit the other studios, get to know the instructors a little, and even arrange visits to a couple of them after the end of the session. Being part of the crew of instructors was very interesting, since we were all teaching different subjects. Hence there was a respect and an interest in what the others were doing, without the need for any comparison or competition. We all in fact wished we had the chance to sit in on the other courses and learn some new techniques!
Teaching at Penland was a unique experience; for what I have to teach, it was a very fun and effective set-up. The studio facility had everything we needed (and it’s got a whole new set of enlargers waiting to be installed), and two weeks was a gloriously long amount of time. My first darkroom class (back in 1991 at Maine Photo Workshops) was also two weeks long, and you really need that long to absorb the information and learn it by practice, which of course, is the only way. If I had had more advanced students, we could have also explored camera modifications and gotten into advanced darkroom techniques. Maybe next time at Penland!
The Toying with Creativity class photo
The class, taken with the Holga Pinhole Wide camera
More photos of the Penland workshop
I hope to make it back to Penland again, and I can’t wait to see what the participants do with their Holgas!
~Michelle