Travel photography is often focused on capturing all the exciting “shiny objects” we see when we’re away from home, but the joy of creating photographs far from home becomes much richer when our work is produced with purpose.
The greatest tool a photographer has is the brain, and Aline Smithson shares new ways of working, providing you with a toolkit of ideas for creating photographs in which you are truly engaged—and, in turn, engage your audience.
To help you consider the medium in new ways, Aline exposes you to genres of contemporary photography, projects created around ideas, and projects that tell personal stories. In addition to leading discussions on best practices for presenting your photographs to the fine-art market, she also meets with each participant to offer individual direction and feedback.
Morning lectures provide inspiration for new ways of seeing and creating work, and yielding assignments leave us plenty of time to capture the beauty of San Miguel.
Join Aline and reconsider how you interpret your life and world. By bringing depth and meaning to your artistic endeavors, you create photographs that tell stories and reveal something deeper about a culture.
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.
Aline Smithson is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and editor based in Los Angeles, California. Her practice examines the archetypal foundations of the creative impulse and she uses humor and pathos to explore the performative potential of photography. She received a BA in Art from the University of California at Santa Barbara and was accepted into the College of Creative Studies, studying under artists such as William Wegman, Allen Rupersburg, and Charles Garabedian. After a career as a New York Fashion Editor working alongside some the greats of fashion photography, Aline returned to Los Angeles and her own artistic practice.
She has exhibited widely including over 40 solo shows at institutions such as the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, the Shanghai, Lishui, and Pingyqo Festivals in China, The Rayko Photo Center in San Francisco, the Center of Fine Art Photography in Colorado, the Tagomago Gallery in Barcelona and Paris, and the Arnika Dawkins Gallery in Atlanta. In addition, her work is held in a number of public collections and her photographs have been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, PDN (cover), the PDN Photo Annual, Communication Arts Photo Annual, Harper’s, Eyemazing, Soura, Visura, Shots, Pozytyw, and Silvershotz magazines.
Aline is the Founder and Editor- in-Chief of Lenscratch, a daily journal on photography. In 2012, Smithson received the Rising Star Award through the Griffin Museum of Photography for her contributions to the photographic community and also received the prestigious Excellence in Teaching Award from CENTER. In 2014 and 2019, Smithson’s work was selected for the Critical Mass Top 50.
In 2015, the Magenta Foundation published her first significant monograph, Self & Others: Portrait as Autobiography. In 2016, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum commissioned her to a series of portraits for the Faces of Our Planet Exhibition. In the Fall of 2018 and again in 2019, her work was selected as a finalist in the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize and exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London. In 2019, Kris Graves Projects commissioned her to create the book LOST II: Los Angeles that is now sold out. Peanut Press Publishing released her monograph, Fugue State in Fall of 2021, also sold out. Her books are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Museum, the Los Angeles Contemporary Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, among others. In 2022, Aline was honored as a Hassleblad Heroine. With the exception of her cell phone, she only uses film.
Get to know Aline in our Inspiration Series video »
Website: alinesmithson.com
Instagram: @alinesmithson
