Below is a list of past or sold out educational programs. Many of these will be offered again in the future. If anything below is of interest to you, email Donna Garcia, donna@griffinmuseum.org to ask to be put on a waitlist.
Photoshop 1 with Sue Anne Hodges
This workshop will allow you to take your images further, technically or creatively, using Adobe Photoshop. It will cover the basics of Photoshop and best practices for a non-destructive workflow using layers, masks, tools and demonstrating a variety of techniques. From the latest retouching tools to creative compositing you will be guided through a series of step-by-step procedures with demonstrations and in class practice exercises. The class will start with information about acquiring the image, the basics of raw processing, file formats and resolution. Then each week will focus on one aspect of use with a demonstration and in class practice using images provided by the teacher. Further homework practice with your own images is encouraged and will be reviewed the following week. If you are a beginner or a self-taught user, you will find this class gives you a solid foundation and creative insight, going beyond the basics to help you get the most out of Photoshop.
Members $595, Non-Members $645 (non-member price includes a one year membership to the Griffin Museum, a $75 value).
ONLINE via Zoom
Instructor Bio:
Sue Anne Hodges is a photographer and educator. Since 1992, Sue Anne has been exploring and using digital cameras and digital imaging technology. She studied this technology at the Center for Creative Imaging in Camden, Maine. Digital images from her early experiments have been included in Kodak’s publication, International Photography, and one of the first exhibits of digital imaging “L’Épreuve Numérique” at the Centre National de la Photographie, Palais de Tokyo, Paris.
Sue Anne was the Director of Digital Imaging at New England School of Photography (NESOP). Her career began as an advertising photographer, helping to build and supervise an in-house studio for Lechmere, a retail chain store. This led her to teaching studio lighting at NESOP where in 1995 she helped them establish the digital imaging department and taught for the past 25 years. In 2011, 2012 and 2018 Sue Anne was honored to be one of 20 educators in the country to be invited by Adobe to attend the Adobe Educators Summit. She remains a specialist in Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom. and Digital Printing.
Her more recent photography has taken her out of the studio and includes a variety of projects including work for The Cultural Landscape Foundation, Down East Magazine, and Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce. Sue Anne’s personal work has been widely exhibited and for 15 years she was represented by Redfield Artisans Gallery in Northeast Harbor, Maine. She splits her time between Mount Desert Island, Maine and West Newbury, Massachusetts.
Image: © ‘Invisible Man’ by Sue Anne Hodges, 2020.
Advanced Critique and Mentoring Program with Aline Smithson
The Griffin Museum is pleased to again offer a mentoring and critique program for conscientious and self-motivated photographers seeking to broaden how they create and think about photography. Participants will get to know one another through monthly critiques and brainstorming sessions. These ideas and suggestions will help hone strengths and elicit a deeply intentional artistic voice. Guest speakers will be featured to share their unique knowledge and perspectives. In addition to sup-
porting photographic projects, participants will work on all the elements that surround their images: the articulation, presentation, and installation.
The group will be led by Aline Smithson, a visual artist, educator and editor based in Los Angeles. She is the founder of LENSCRATCH, a photography journal that celebrates a different photographer each day.
About the instructor:
Aline Smithson is a visual artist, educator, and editor based in Los Angeles, California. Best known for her conceptual portraiture and a practice that uses humor and pathos to explore the performative potential of photography. Growing up in the shadow of Hollywood, her work is influenced by the elevated unreal. She received a BA in art from the University of California at Santa Barbara and was accepted into the College of Creative Studies, studying under artists such as William Wegman, Allen Ruppersburg, and Charles Garabian. After a decade-long career as a New York Fashion Editor, Aline returned to Los Angeles and to her own artistic practice.
She has exhibited widely including over 40 solo shows at institutions such as the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, the San Jose Art Museum, the Shanghai, Lishui, and Pingyqo Festivals in China, The Rayko Photo
Center in San Francisco, the Center of Fine Art Photography in Colorado, the Tagomago Gallery in Barcelona and Paris, and the Verve Gallery in Santa Fe. In addition, her work is held in a number of public collections and her photographs have been featured in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, PDN, Communication Arts, Eyemazing, Real Simple, Los Angeles, Visura, Shots,
Pozytyw, and Silvershotz magazines.
In 2007, Aline founded LENSCRATCH, a photography journal that celebrates a different contemporary photographer each day. She has been the Gallery Editor for Light Leaks Magazine, a contributing writer for Diffusion, Don’t Take Pictures, Lucida, and F Stop Magazines, has written book reviews for photo-eye, and has provided the forewords for artist’s books by Tom Chambers, Meg Griffiths, Flash Forward 12, Robert Rutoed, Nancy Baron, among others. Aline has curated and juried exhibitions for a number of galleries, organizations, and on-line magazines, including Review Santa Fe, Critical Mass, Flash Forward, and the Griffin Museum. In addition, she is a reviewer and educator at many photo festivals across the United States. She teaches at LACP, The Griffin Museum of Photography, Maine Media Workshops and Sante Fe Workshops among others. In 2012, Aline received the Rising Star Award through the Griffin Museum of Photography for her contributions to the photographic community. In 2014 and 2019, Aline’s work was selected for Critical Mass Top 50 and she received the Excellence in Teaching Award from CENTER. In 2015, the Magenta Foundation published her first significant monograph, Self & Others: Portrait as Autobiography. In 2016, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum commissioned Aline to a series of portraits for the upcoming Faces of Our Planet Exhibition and in 2018 and 2019, Aline was a finalist in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize and is exhibiting at the National Portrait Gallery, London. She was commissioned to create the book, LOST: Los Angeles for Kris Graves Projects which released in 2019. Her books are in the collections of the Getty Museum, the Los Angeles Contemporary Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, among others. She is a 2022 Hasselblad Heroine. With the exception of her cell phone, she only shoots film.
Advanced Critique & Mentoring: Project Development with Andrew L. Moore
The Griffin Museum is pleased to offer this intermediate-advanced project development program for photographers who аre seeking to start a new project (series), or take their current project to the next level. Students will participate in monthly critiques, and this workshop will offer a comprehensive opportunity to experiment with or reimagine your concepts and ideas. You will also discover tools and techniques that will keep your work relevant and compelling.
The objective for this class is to further develop your personal photographic vision and elevate your understanding of a photography project and where it can go. In addition, participants will work on multiple elements that enhance their image making: from the articulation, presentation, and potential installation of the work, to how you can effectively transition your work from the prints on the wall
to a successful photo book. Andrew L. Moore, a visual artist, and educator based in New York, will lead this class. His work is held in countless museum collections, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of Fine Art, just to name a few. He has published multiple books and was named a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation Fellow in 2014. He was also awarded Special Jury Prize at 2002 Sundance Film Festival and has extensive experience in film and video.
About the Instructor:
American photographer Andrew Moore (b. 1957) is widely
acclaimed for his photographic series, usually taken over
many years, which record the effect of time on the natural
and built landscape. These series include work made in Cuba,
Russia, Bosnia, Times Square, Detroit, the High Plains, the
American South and most recently, the Hudson Valley.
Moore’s photographs are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Library of Congress amongst many other institutions. He has received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2014, and has as well been award grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the J M Kaplan Fund. His most recent book, Blue Alabama, with a preface by Imani Perry and story by Madison Smartt Bell was released in the fall of 2019. His previous work on the lands and people along the 100th Meridian in the US, called Dirt Meridian, with a preface by Kent Haruf, was exhibited at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha. An earlier book, the bestselling Detroit Disassembled, included an essay by the late Poet Laureate Philip Levine. An exhibition of the same title opened at the Akron Museum of Art before also traveling to the Queens Museum of Art, the Grand Rapids Art Museum, and the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. Moore’s other books include: Inside Havana (2002), Gover-
nors Island (2004) and Russia, Beyond Utopia (2005) and Cuba (2012. Additionally, his photographs have appeared in Art in America, Artnews, The Bitter Southerner, Harpers, National Geographic, New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, TIME, Vogue, Wired and World of Interiors. Moore produced and photographed “How to Draw a Bunny,” a documentary feature film on Ray Johnson, who when he died in 1996 was called “New York’s most famous unknown artist”. The movie
premiered at the 2002 Sundance Festival, where it won a Special Jury prize. Mr. Moore was a lecturer on photography in the Visual Arts Program at Princeton University from 2001 to 2010. Presently he teaches a graduate seminar in the MFA Photography Video and Related Media program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He has been represented since 1994 by the Yancey Richardson Gallery in NYC where he will be showing his newest work from the Hudson Valley in the fall of 2023.
Writing About Your Photography with Elin Spring and Suzanne Révy (5 sessions)
Why write about your photography? Aren’t your pictures supposed to say it all? Ideally, but written cues can offer viewers helpful entry points into your work. If you exhibit your work, artist statements, project statements and biographies are necessities. If you are applying for an artist residency, a grant or a call for entry, writing eloquently will illuminate the intention and process that sparked your imagery. The bottom line is, effective communication elevates your work.
In our first session of the course, we explain “best practices” for starting and maintaining successful writing habits, offer valuable tips on expressing your genuine voice, and demonstrate examples of both clear and ineffectual communication. Using these tools, each participant prepares a piece of writing to share in subsequent workshop sessions. By discussing your piece, editing and presenting it again, as well as partaking in the same process for other members of our class, you will learn both by doing and observing. At the end of this workshop, each person will have a polished piece and a fresh approach to sharing their views on photography.
About the instructors:
Elin Spring is Founder & Editor of the online photography review magazine, What Will You Remember? and a contributing writer to other online and print magazines and exhibition catalogs. She regularly juries photography competitions such as Critical Mass and The FENCE, curates exhibits, and conducts portfolio reviews at national photography festivals, highlighting newly discovered work online. In 2014, her photography writing was recognized with the Scribe FOCUS Award from the Griffin Museum of Photography. Before concentrating full-time on WWYR?, for over two decades she specialized in professional portraiture in and around Boston. An active member of the Photographic Resource Center (Cambridge, MA), Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester, MA), and Marblehead Arts Association (MA), Elin earned her bachelor’s degree from Brown University and Ph.D. in Neuroscience from University of Pennsylvania.
Suzanne Révy is a photographer, writer and educator who earned a BFA from the Pratt Institute in 1984. She worked in editorial and magazine publishing as a photography editor for fifteen years before the arrival of two sons. She created a long term photographic diary of their lives, and earned an MFA from the New Hampshire Institute of Art in 2016. She teaches at Clark University in Worcester, MA., is the Associate Editor at the online photography magazine “What Will You Remember/” and serves on the board of the Photographic Resource Center in Cambridge, MA.
Recently, she has been wandering in the woods and meadows around her suburban Boston home with a camera and tripod making multi-panel photographs of the local landscape.
The Constructed Photograph: Creating Original Digital Imagery with Maggie Taylor
The Griffin Museum is pleased to offer this intermediate-advanced constructed photography program for lens-based artists who аre seeking to create the highest quality assembled work.
This class will be focused on layering an image in Photoshop with a variety of source materials. Using old found or family photographs, scans and cell phone images, Maggie will share her favorite techniques for creating a painterly and cohesive collage. Lighting, shading, playing with color, using masks and smart objects will all be explored over the six class periods. Newer tools and techniques for assemblage will also be explored, such as AI and iPhone photography. After each session participants will be able to download the files Maggie has used for the lecture, and follow along with the recorded Zoom to rebuild the images on their own. This class size is limited. The objective for this class is to further develop your skills and elevate your understanding of digital photographic collage and explore new or advanced ways to elevate your work.
Level: Intermediate to Advanced. A working knowledge of Photoshop, including familiarity with using adjustment layers, masks and blend modes will be helpful for this class. It is aimed at advanced/intermediate to advanced Photoshop enthusiasts.
About the instructor:
Maggie Taylor is the instructor for this workshop, and is known for her innovative style and creating work that exist as a kind of visual riddle or open-ended poem, meant to be both playful and provocative. Each image is meant to tell a different story every time a different person looks at it. She says that often people think photography is autobiographical and her work is definitely a reflection of her life.
In 1995 Adobe’s creative director was trying to convince photomontage artists of the time to utilize Photoshop in their work. Maggie was one of the first who did and is considered a trailblazer of digital imagery for photography. She began creating her surrealist work with the tool, breaking ground and helping to create the modern “Photoshop” genre. Many established artists have taken Maggie’s workshop to take their work to the next level.
Maggie Taylor is an artist who lives at the edge of a prairie on the outskirts of Gainesville, Florida. She was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1961, and moved to Florida at the age of 11. Her childhood was spent watching countless hours of situation comedies and science fiction on television; later she received a philosophy degree from Yale University. A little later she got a master’s degree in photography from the University of Florida. Her digital composites have been collected and exhibited internationally.
