Joe
& Joanna Swayze
Plein Air Photography, or Photography on the Road
June 15-21
Course
Description:
Longtime teachers and artists, Joanna and Joe Swayze, have made silver
prints in a wine cellar in Tuscany, have taught Russian students in a kitchen
darkroom in Moscow, have made digital prints for journals on two bicycle
trips to Vietnam, have shared mail art and bookmaking ideas with fellow
travelers in New Zealand, and most recently have made cyanotypes of moai
on Easter Island.
The workshop will explain how easy and rewarding it can be to make photographic prints when and where you shoot, versus waiting to work in a fully equipped wet darkroom, or a sophisticated digital center.
Think of this approach as Plein Air Photography, or Photography on the Road. Homegrown solutions will allow you to make printing part of the immediate photo-experience, whether in far-flung destinations or in your own backyard. Expect to learn, among other things, about pulling Polaroids, exposing cyanotypes, making enlarged digital negatives, processing film in the field, as well as providing a home for your art in the form of a journal or handmade book.
Biography:
Joe and Joanna Swayze have been longtime members of the art faculty at Noble
and Greenough School in Dedham, Massachusetts. They have also taught the
Young Photographers Workshop for more than ten years.
Joanna is a photographer, painter, and journal-keeper who works out of her studio in Gloucester. Joe is a photographer and currently the Artist-in-Residence at Noble and Greenough, where he has a studio/darkroom. Committed travelers, Joe and Joanna have led student trips to Italy, Ireland, Scotland, Vietnam, and Russia. In every case, the Swayzes have encouraged students to combine art and travel by promoting journal-keeping, setting up informal darkrooms for onsite printing, and more recently, putting digital technology to use on the road.
Taking advantage of artist residence programs, Joe was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, NH in the spring of 2001, where he worked on a portfolio of images from Vietnam. More recently, in the fall of 2006, Joe and Joanna spent two weeks making art at Can Serrat, outside of Barcelona, Spain, where Joanna, a collector of paper ephemera, made a series of collages incorporating some of these found objects. Currently, Joe is making cyanotypes and silver prints from images he shot as part of a trip to Easter Island in June with a small group of Nobles students and faculty.
Joanna studied printmaking and photography at Bennington College in Bennington Vermont. Joe is a graduate of Williams College. His interest in photography began as a U.S. Army Information Officer in Vietnam, a country to which he has returned four times. The Swayzes live in Rockport, Massachusetts. They have one son, Andrew, married to Jean Andersson Swayze, and one grandchild, Caroline.
Supply List for participants to bring from home:
- 35mm camera
- 5 rolls tri-x 400 black and white film
- medium format camera, (can be a plastic Holga) to produce larger negatives,
- 5 rolls of 120 b/w tri-x film
- a digital camera w/cards
- a pinhole camera, if you have one
- a tripod
- 1 box 5 x 7 RC paper (100 sheets)
- a few old contact sheets
- old negatives, including larger negatives for alternative process printing, as well as some 35 mm negatives
- negative sleeves for 35 mm, 120 and 4 x 5 film
- a printing frame ( if you have one)
- addresses of friends and family for mail art journal
- materials, such as rubber stamps, scissors, glue sticks, favorite pens, watercolors, brushes, books, (art, photographic or otherwise) that inspire you
- a laptop computer (if you like)
Note: we will have on hand extra Holgas, pinhole cameras and a 4 x 5 field camera for class use. We will also order journals and other journal supplies for everyone.