Land as Collaborator: Remixing Digital Prints in the Landscape

How might we think of landscape imagery as active rather than reiterating a passive gaze? With the long history of artists documenting the natural Southwestern landscape as observers, photographers sometimes forget that we too are part of the environments we inhabit. 

Artist and educator Anna Rotty seeks to remind participants of the interconnection between the landscape, humanity, and our creative process. Join Anna for this week-long workshop in Santa Fe as she guides participants through iterative processes in photography and digital printmaking that push both mediums to new creative heights. We learn to view the natural world as our collaborator as we move back and forth from the land to the studio, remixing digital images and prints with found natural elements.

We open this workshop by photographing a beautiful landscape location near Santa Fe, where Anna guides students in slow-looking exercises, sketching with the camera as we familiarize ourselves with a new environment. We then take our images back to the Digital Lab to bring our work to life as physical prints. Working iteratively, participants learn the technical skills of digital fine-art printmaking through Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. 

After experimenting with a variety of digital papers, we bring our photographic prints back into the environment to become part of a layered representation of landscape. Practicing thoughtful framing and viewfinder techniques, we collapse multiple moments in time by bringing physical prints back into the world to be re-photographed. Participants are encouraged to incorporate natural elements into their compositions and explore what is possible when we allow land, water, sunlight, and shadow to factor into our representations of place.

This workshop consists of field trips photographing in nature, printing demonstrations and exercises, a series of experimental techniques, and lectures and discussions geared to expand our practices and engage the landscape as a collaborator. On the final day, we share and reflect on how layering, print manipulation, and abstraction can expand the ways in which we see and understand the land. Participants leave with 10 exhibition-quality prints, a technical foundation in digital printmaking, and an expanded creative framework for photographing and engaging in relationships with the natural world.

This workshop is designed for photographers seeking to expand their creative practice and broaden their definition of the printed image. We explore how physical prints generate experimentation and play, allowing us to access a more complete and emotional sense of space, place, and memory. Join us for a week in Santa Fe to expand your technical skill set and work in collaboration with the land to explore new definitions of place and relationship.