Photography and Art: Building Bridges
with Valda Bailey
October 18 and 25, 2025
Course Description
Photography has long been seen as a mirror of reality—a tool to capture what is. Art, on the other hand, often reaches toward the abstract, the symbolic, the imagined. But what happens when we dissolve that boundary? When photography stops documenting and starts dreaming? When the lens becomes a brush, and the image becomes not just visual evidence, but expression?
In this new online program with artist Valda Bailey, she explores that in-between space—where photography becomes more than a record and enters into a dialogue with painting, abstraction, and storytelling. Spanning two Saturdays in October, Valda discusses blending visual languages, subverting expectations, and creating work that challenges the separation between what is real and what we feel. This is not just about technique, although she covers it, but she focuses mainly on intention. About asking: What if? Can a photograph mean something beyond what it shows? How can it hold memory, metaphor, atmosphere—or even silence? And how can we, as artists, push the photographic medium toward new forms of expression?
Join Valda online as she unravels, dissects, and reveals her current thoughts and ideas on the process of making art, being a creative being, and its benefits in a chaotic world.
Additional Information
WHO SHOULD ATTEND:
Open to anyone interested in this special program.
Special Notes:
Class will meet 9:30 – 11:30 am (Mountain Time) on Saturday, October 18 and Saturday, October 25 (two online group sessions).
Zoom Video Conferencing software (available for no charge from Zoom.com) will be used to facilitate the class sessions. Further details will be emailed to registrants.
Santa Fe Workshops always aims to produce a high-quality experience for our online attendees. That said, variables including regional and local internet provider speeds, traffic on Zoom's servers, and your own computing hardware can contribute to a less than ideal streaming event. While we do our best to minimize the impact of these variables, they are outside the control of Santa Fe Workshops.
Policies:
View Withdrawal and Transfer Policies for online programs.
For the convenience of participants, recordings of each class session are posted privately for one month after the end of each session. Santa Fe Workshops takes the recordings down after one month to protect the intellectual property of our instructors.
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about
Valda Bailey is a freelance photographic artist living in Sussex, England. Her approach to photography is greatly informed by her background in painting and her influences come as much from artists as photographers. She is largely motivated by color and form and the tension and dynamism that these components can bring to an image. She makes her images using in-camera multiple exposure which help to create abstract shapes and blur extraneous detail. Her objectives are to portray an emotive interpretation of a scene rather than a literal representation.
Valda made her U.S. debut in 2017 in the group exhibition Into the Woods at Sohn Fine Art in Lenox, MA. In 2015, she was the first woman to be invited to join six other photographers to exhibit at the Biennial Masters of Vision at the Southwell Minster, United Kingdom. More recently, Valda has exhibited throughout the United Kingdom with solo presentations of her work at MMX Gallery, The Sun Beyond the Shadow (2018), and a traveling exhibition, titled Fragile, which was on view at the Jersey Arts Centre and at Bosham Gallery (2017). Her work is consistently included in group exhibitions, including Tides + Falls at Sohn Fine Art, Lenox, MA and Vision 9, OXO Gallery, London, both in 2018.
Her photography is included in corporate and private collections worldwide and her work has been purchased by notable members of the art and photographic community.
Website: valdabailey.com
Instagram: @valda_bailey_art
