Joanna and Joe Swayze

Plein Air Photography

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, and providing a home for your art in the form of a journal or handmade book.

Artist's 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. 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.