Kelly Lynn James
Lance Rosenfield (Burn Magazine)
Matthew Hinton (Times Picayune Staff)
Jaime Carrero (Freelance and Free Spirit)
Mark Ovaska
Jonathan Scheide
Jonathan Moore
Dominic Bracco
Charles Silver
Neal Jackson
Sara Hopkins
Kirsten Luce (New York Times Intern)
Christopher Guess
James Quine
Brian Frank (Burn Magazine)
Amber Sexton (People Magazine/Photoshelter)
Handan Erek
Gyula Sopronyi (Hungary)
Lizzie Ford-Madrid
Kevin Jones
Steven Zeswitz (Brenda Ann Kenneally)
Allen Echols Sullivan (Zuma Press)
and many more

From the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward to the hipsters of the Marigny and the southern traditions of the Garden District, New Orleans is a great place to learn story telling skills in a relaxed atmosphere of shared photographic experience.
This workshop will involve daily editing sessions and close consultation in your choice of stories.

Students will be encouraged to develop stories of social significance in coordination with the many organizations working in New Orleans to improve the lives of New Orleanians today. Digital camera and laptop suggested. Students are responsible for travel, hotel, and meal expenses.

Tuition: $625
Dates: October 10th- October 16th

To register and pay for this workshop click here
To be included in a mailing list for updates on this workshop click here

cforms contact form by delicious:days

cforms contact form by delicious:days

As a photographer who has been fortunate to work under some of the best editors in the glory days of photography, as well as having the benefit of being both a portfolio reviewer and judge for contemporary photography events, I am enthusiastic about helping you to become the best that you can be.

Look at the photographers featured in 100Eyes, and look at some of the student essays listed under “recent work” on the site. If these is the sort of work that you aspire to in your photography, a 100Eyes workshop is for you.

Hope to see you soon!

Andy Levin

New Orleans Workshop October 10th

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Mental Illness in the Kentucky State Reformatory

The continuous withdrawal of mental health funding has turned jails and prisons across the U.S. into the default mental health facilities.
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They say ghosts emerge from under the water in Jaflong, a regional district north-east of Sylhet in Bangladesh. These are the stone-collectors who work in the Dowki River, bringing up stones to earn their daily wage of about 700 to 800 taka in murky underwater conditions made cloudy by the fan of the boat engine that works to stir up the sand so the rocks can materialize. Read More/Comment

Among his insightful comments Brook questions why photographers, who were apparently grouped together around Fabienne’s fallen body, made a conscious effort to not show other each other in the frame. It was a spontaneous “spot news” event, unplanned, and including the other photographers in the frame would have only been a distraction. The idea is to make the audience feel that they are experiencing the events themselves, and I think the photographers did a brilliant job in a tragic and difficult situation. We are all angry at the death of Fabienne, but blaming the photographers, even if there were so many, is missing the point a bit.

Of course, if the end result is that the death is simply ignored, and the image is just one of a series of brutal depictions that are simply one version of what happened in Haiti, how can we not ask questions about the uses of photojournalism? Yet even then, photographers are really like ants on the back of the beast which is the media, whatever that means in the digital age. We can’t control the uses of our images, and we are often struggling just to survive ourselves.

For the most part the first two weeks of coverage from Haiti was drawn from a very limited area, and drawn from images taken by photographers, like myself, who were not Haitian. Although Haitian born Daniel Morel, was in Port au Prince when the quake struck, and documented the courageous Haitians who pulled each other from buildings, once the news photographers arrived, the press rarely ventured into the residential neighborhoods of Port au Prince, but instead reported from a small area of downtown that was close to the Plaza and Park Hotels where most where staying. This is coincidentally where almost all of the “looting” was taking place, and was also of the most heavily damaged areas of the city, certainly the most visual as far as showing the magnitude of the devastation. One of the difficulties in photography is that pictures are limited…..one image can’t convey the feeling one gets from seeing miles of devastation. The picture must be symbolic of a greater reality. Certainly the downtown area could be a symbol of Port au Prince as a whole in showing the effects of the earthquake, but it was not a residential area at the time, and the events there were certainly not representative of a greater reality, in which Haitians were heroic, did not loot, and in the first hours wandered about the city in search of their families and loved ones. Coincidentally, some of this reality was conveyed in Morel’s take from the first hours after the quake….

The result, and no fault of the photographers, was that the coverage was skewed, especially as the sensational looting scenes always play big in the newspapers. In fact there were many more people murdered by police after Katrina than in Haiti, but the proximity of the killings and the presence of so many photographers, gave a vastly different impression. In fact, although all of us who have spent time in Haiti know that the Haitians are for a most part peaceful people, we also know that argument can result in escalations to horrific and very public violence that included brutality unacceptable in most of the world– and that random violence of police against people have certainly marred the history of the country. But in this specfic case, the aftermath of the earthquake, the images of shot “looters” fueled a very negative perception of Haitians and in fact the police. The fact is that these were the exceptions rather than the rule, but they became the focal point of essays like the one produced by James Oatway for a South African paper, that although truthful does not really show the bigger story of what happened in Port au Prince after the earthquake, when most Haitians did not riot and many Haitians acted heroically. Unfortunately this perspective was often neglected in the press, who tends to stereotype Haitians as both violent and victims, of which the later may be slightly truer than the former, but neither of which really captures the Haitian personality in my opinion. I try to go out of my way to include in my edits some images that balance the violence with some humanity, and even beauty. Granted that this is easier because I do not work much in the food chain of the commercial press anymore, one that seems to take any event and simply use it up, and drop it, rather than deal with the longterm issues involved.

You can read all of the Pete Brook’s commentary and interviews with the photographers here.

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