4-DAY WORKSHOP (3 full days plus morning session on the fourth day)

LISE SARFATI: FICTION & REALITY; Narrative in Fine Art Photography

Read Elizabeth Avedon’s interview with Lise Sarfati in “La Lettre”.
Read the New Yorker Article on Lise Sarfati.
Read article with photographs from TIME Magazine on Lise Sarfati
Read the article in the March 23 NY Times

As many of you know, the idea of creating fictional stories in color fine art photography has become very popular (some say cutting-edge) in recent years. In this workshop, French art photographer Lise Sarfati will delve into the methods and inspirations that inform her well-known narrative photographic work.

Each of her photographs clearly points to her approach of focusing on the intensity of the rapport established with the person photographed, and of that person within a fictional narrative (the context). The goal is a vision in which the individual, in an environment, is constructed without affectation. The style tends to be elementary and clean, avoiding all pretensions, but the skillful combination of each element and each person kindle a thousand fleeting images we all hold in our minds. She identifies a very precise and endless psychological spectrum that is illustrated in her works. Create pictures that ask questions of the viewer – use subjects to recreate instances from your own lives.

“Fiction is a reflection of your interior world and photography is how it is projected into Reality. The result from this meeting of your own inner world (the Fiction) and the exterior world (The Reality) is the subject of this workshop.
Students of this workshop are invited to imagine a narrative they could enact before their camera during the workshop, incorporating the landscape of Palm Springs and nearby towns as elements of the story. We will have 1940s – 1960s locations available, plus perhaps an old motel, and the beautiful Korakia Pensione as options; Interiors as well as exteriors. It’s not necessary to have conceived a narrative in advance – but if students can call upon a distant memory (Fiction) to bring to the workshop and execute (Reality) it would be possible to use as a starting point. Students could work at night or day , with elements and accessories they bring. Again not necessary – as Lise will help students, through discussion, to arrive at an idea to execute for the class. The essential is the photograph should feel authentic and ask questions of the viewer.
Model subjects will be available and the class will be divided into groups so that each student can help to bring to life the Fictional Realities of the others as well as their own. Much can be gained by helping others to construct their images as well as shooting one’s own.

“Lise’s work is the subject of two back-to-back exhibitions at the prestigious Rose Gallery in Santa Monica, On Hollywood and SHE. On Hollywood is a series of photographs of marginal women living in Hollywood, California. The subjects are “living strange and terrible fates that they are aware of but which they never seem to achieve any control over”; the photographs from this work represent the way these women choose to project themselves visually and the tensions between their illusions and life’s actual realities in modern day Los Angeles. SHE is a highly personal body of work, focused on the interconnections between four females of a simple family as they experience major transitions in their respective lives.

Attendees of this workshop are invited to check out cameras and lenses from Canon, Leica, Fuji and Mamiya at Korakia Pensione each morning before the workshop begins (8:00am – 9:00am).

Photographers working with digital cameras should bring their laptops and be conversant with their hardware and software in order to facilitate downloading and projecting their work for critiques in this workshop. Digital projectors with standard VGA cables will be provided. If you require DVI connectors and / or adapters, please bring one to class.