Words and Images: The Art of Creative Fusion
with Manuela Thames
January 12 – 29, 2027
Course Description
We are all familiar with the saying, “A picture says more than a thousand words.” While this sentiment holds a lot of truth, this online workshop invites you to explore how writing can deepen, expand, and clarify your photographic work. Led by photographic artist Manuela Thames, this six-session course creates time and space to investigate the dynamic relationship between words and images, and how writing can become an active tool within your creative practice.
Through a series of guided prompts and assignments—including journaling, mind mapping, creating your own erasure poetry, experimenting with typography, and exploring simple design and layout approaches—you experiment with different ways of combining text and image. Each session includes time for group discussion and student work review, offering space to share progress, reflect on ideas, and receive feedback. You use writing, visual language, and design choices to generate ideas, clarify intent, and uncover new ways of thinking about your photographs. Rather than treating writing as an add-on, the workshop encourages you to use language and form as tools that inform how you see, sequence, present, and understand your work.
You also spend time looking at and discussing photo books and fine-art projects by artists who work across both mediums, paying close attention to how text functions alongside images. These discussions offer insight into how photographers and writers use language to shape meaning, rhythm, narrative, and emotional resonance.
By the end of the workshop, you leave with practical strategies for integrating writing into your creative process, a deeper understanding of how text and image can work together, and new tools for expanding and articulating your artistic expression.
Additional Information
WHO SHOULD ATTEND:
What You Should Know:
Participants need to be technically self-sufficient, as this is not a workshop to learn how to use your gear or editing software. Participants must be able to download, select, and submit images for class each day.
Special Notes:
Class will meet 9:30 – 11:30 am (Mountain Time) on Tuesdays and Fridays starting January 12 and ending January 29 (six online group sessions). Enrollment is limited to 12 participants.
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.
These live online sessions take place in the standard Zoom meeting format. Students can use their microphone and camera, see and hear the instructor and other students, and participate in live discussion and interaction throughout the sessions.
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 Cancellation and Transfer Policies for online programs.
Recording class sessions using personal devices or third-party tools is not permitted. Session recordings are provided by Santa Fe Workshops and are available to enrolled students for two months after the class. This policy helps protect the intellectual property and privacy of both instructors and students.
about
Manuela Thames is a photographic artist based in Saint Paul, Minnesota where she lives with her husband and two children. Born and raised in Germany, she moved to the US in 2004 after marrying her American husband. Shortly thereafter she began her photography journey after two life changing events happened within one year, the birth of her first son and the death of her brother.
Largely self-taught, Manuela uses various photographic techniques to explore themes around loss and grief, her personal experience with generational trauma, as well as the notions of belonging, connection and what it means to be human. Within that she continues to explore human ways of coping, the strength that evolves out of suffering and our common desire for healing and journey towards wholeness. Much of her work consists of black and white, conceptual self-portraits.
Manuela’s photography has been described as contemplative, evocative, dark, and cinematic and has been widely exhibited nationally as well as internationally. Her “Trauma” series won 1st place conceptual series of the year in the Monovisions Award in 2019, and in the same year she won the 13th Julia Margaret Cameron Award in the Self-Portrait Category. In addition, her work has been published online and in print in such places as Black and White Magazine, Sun Magazine, Dohdo Magazine and Shots Magazine.
Website: manuelathames.com
Instagram: @manuelathames
