Finding the Stories - A Photography Workshop

This workshop combines photo analysis, theory and practical photographic work. Together we will clarify the constitution of a narrative and the process of how the meaning of a photograph is being created. In addition
to producing your own photo series, you will become skilled at looking at, reading and talking about photographs.

Throughout the course, assignments will be given to help the individual students discover and tell their stories in photographs. At each meeting the participants will take pictures based on the particular task for the day. Together we will then look at and discuss the different images the group has come up with. There will also be work involving already existing photographs. We will deal with issues like subjectivity and objectivity, private and public, as well as technical issues like light situations, which will be talked through and prepared for.

The workshop will also include collaborations between students and some text work.

We will explore a variety of aesthetic issues together, as well as practical and conceptual ones, asking questions like: What is my relation to the topic? Where does this narrative begin or end? On the last day, each participant will have her/his own photo series to show to the rest of the group.

• Course language: English and German
• No photographic experience is needed
• The participants should have interest in working with content as well as form
• Each student will need to bring a digital camera or phone camera to every meeting

Carla Åhlander is a Swedish-Italian artist based in Berlin. She mainly works with photography and deals with themes moving between memory and history. The immediate situations Åhlander documents in her photographs are rather subtle appearances of power relations and systems of order – in all shades and from the vocabulary of everyday life – situations where something is about to happen or could happen, taken from a multiple of contexts, often with no beginning or end in narrative terms. Her solo presentations include The Idea of a Mountain, Skepparholmen (2016), Noteringar: tillstånd, platser, Fotogalleriet Format, Malmö, (2014), and the public billboard piece Perspektiven (2013–2016) for nGbK, Berlin, installed in the subway station Schwartzkopffstraße in Berlin. Group exhibitions include Police the Police, Biennial for Young Art, Bucharest (2010), Boredom, Essays & Observations, Berlin (2012), Interkontinental, Belmacz, London (2016), The 9th Norwegian Sculpture Biennial, Vigeland-museet, Oslo (2017).

carlaahlander.com