There are many overlaps between the craft of photography and the craft of writing, and the ability to pair images with words can greatly enhance your photographic work. Writing may feel intimidating at first, but once you understand the basics, it flows easily.
To practice craft on a manageable scale, we focus on flash memoir, a literary micro-genre that encourages us to enliven our senses and emotions, identify moments of insight, and expertly magnify the small aspects of what it means to be human. By pairing our images with a piece of writing 3,000 words in length maximum, we are able to illuminate a deeper story of truth.
Gina Rae La Cerva covers the foundational aspects of good writing, including narrative arc, structure, sentence construction, timing, transitions, and character development. For extra support, she engages in a 30-minute, one-on-one session with each participant.
Whether you ultimately plan to write an introductory essay for a photo book, enhance your bio or artist statement, or simply create excellent image captions, this workshop helps you discover how enlightening and pleasurable writing can be—especially when you start small. In the process of constructing a piece of flash memoir, you find your creativity reinvigorated, both on the page and through the lens.
Open to photographers interested in this unique program.
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.
Gina Rae La Cerva is an award-winning writer, geographer, and environmental anthropologist originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has researched tsunamis in Indonesia, crossed the Pacific Ocean on a sailboat, and traced the wild meat trade from the forests of the Congo Basin to the streets of Paris. Her first book, Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food, was recommended by the The New York Times and named an Amazon Best Book of the Year for 2020. Her personal essays have appeared in Emergence Magazine, THE Magazine, Sage Magazine, and various compilations. Gina Rae holds degrees from Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Vassar College.
Website: ginaraelc.com
