Cultivate Your Artistic Vision

with Manuela Thames

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Course Description

Join fine-art photographer Manuela Thames in the beautiful setting of Santa Fe to explore and cultivate your personal vision and artistic voice. Manuela offers a unique approach in helping you uncover the motivations behind your work and the voices you should listen to and those you should ignore.

Using the tools you have as a photographer—your equipment, imagination, and post processing options—this unique workshop provides a safe space for you to step outside your comfort zone, confront your fears, and gain a deeper understanding of your role and purpose as an artist. This transformative process ultimately provides a deeper understanding of yourself, your story, and your life’s path.

Through evocative writing exercises and photography prompts, Manuela guides you to explore creative vision, process, and practice. While discovering how to find inspiration and new ideas, you begin to uncover a deeper understanding of what it means to create original images and the importance of developing your vision.

Our mornings are spent in the classroom providing feedback for each other’s work, listening, writing, and sharing insights. In the afternoons, we spend time creating new images on location in and around Santa Fe. We experiment with self-portraiture and also photograph models. There is also time to take individual photo walks practicing mindful observation.

Manuela’s workshop is perfect for photographers who desire to dive deeper, grow in their confidence as an artist, and strengthen the belief that their work matters and makes a difference in this world. Journey to New Mexico and partake in the creative spirit that resides deep within the land.

Additional Information

COVID-19 Update: For all in-person workshops and trips in 2023, Santa Fe Workshops highly recommends that all participants, staff, and instructors attending be up to date with Covid vaccinations (per definition of the CDC).

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Amateurs, Advanced Amateurs

What You Should Know:

Working knowledge of digital workflow and manual mode on your digital SLR or mirrorless camera. Participants must be able to download and select images using image editing software for class sessions.

Activity Level:

To get the most from your workshop experience, participants should be in good physical (mobility, stamina) and mental health. Come prepared for the high elevation of Santa Fe, long days, and seasonal weather including high temperatures. You must be able to carry your own photographic and personal gear at all times, both on campus and on location. You are responsible for being open and honest about your physical fitness, and we reserve the right to remove you from the workshop if we find your fitness to be less than that which you have described.

Policies:

View Payment, Refund, Withdrawal, and Transfer Policies for domestic workshops.

about

Manuela Thames

Manuela Thames is a photographic artist based in Saint Paul, Minnesota where she lives with her husband and two children. Born and raised in Germany, she moved to the US in 2004 after marrying her American husband. Shortly thereafter she began her photography journey after two life changing events happened within one year, the birth of her first son and the death of her brother.

Largely self-taught, Manuela uses various photographic techniques to explore themes around loss and grief, her personal experience with generational trauma, as well as the notions of belonging, connection and what it means to be human. Within that she continues to explore human ways of coping, the strength that evolves out of suffering and our common desire for healing and journey towards wholeness. Much of her work consists of black and white, conceptual self-portraits.

Manuela’s photography has been described as contemplative, evocative, dark, and cinematic and has been widely exhibited nationally as well as internationally. Her “Trauma” series won 1^st place conceptual series of the year in the Monovisions Award in 2019, and in the same year she won the 13^th Julia Margaret Cameron Award in the Self-Portrait Category. In addition, her work has been published online and in print in such places as Black and White Magazine, Sun Magazine, Dohdo Magazine and Shots Magazine.