Photographing in the Social Landscape

Photographing in the Social Landscape is designed for participants who want to make photographs in public places, but not necessarily as street photographers. There are a great many ways to work in the world and an urban environment without photographing up-close to crowds and people like Henri Cartier Bresson, Garry Winogrand, or Alex Webb. One can emulate Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, or Lee Friedlander using the objects and the arrangements of public space to express ideas about chaos, color, and mass culture.

We start this online workshop with Thomas Alleman by investigating the social landscape itself—not as a physical location but as an idea about how the built environment ticks. How do people and cars and buildings interact with infrastructure, advertisers, city planners, figures of authority, and each other in the public sphere? How do photographers see the patterns and dances in this unique landscape, such that they can be photographed?

The lecture-titles that Thomas presents may suggest where this workshop is headed: Red Curbs, Neon, And Big Pictures: The Social Landscape Speaks to Us; Signs of Life: The Photographer Gathers Evidence; The Man and the Crowd: Heroes Traverse the Social Landscape; and The Urban Landscape: A Sense of Place. Throughout the four weeks, these weighty considerations are balanced by direct photo-talk in our image reviews, which also feature a constant trickle of insight and advice on camera technique, composition, and cropping.