NUDE AS FORM
Connie Imboden is a master of creating stunning art-pieces of the human form, often using reflective surfaces like water or mirrors.
She will help you develop an intuitive visual approach in photographing the body, and make you see it in a new way to help you create original work with this most photographed subject in the history of photography.
The workshop will consist of lectures, discussions, exercises, assignments, image critic and a lot of shooting time. The first day is spent looking closely at the human body as form. We then go outside and look at the human form in relation to nature. We will spent 2 days shooting at a private pool to practise shooting in, under and above water. You need to bring your bathing gear, waterproof camera or camera-bag. A weight belt might come in handy. If you do not want to get into the water yourself, you will still get a chance to photograph the model in water.
Students will leave this workshop with a new approach in photographing nudes. You will also discovered the magic that can happen when we transform the human form by using reflections, water, mirroring, movement, and light.
‘Our vision is so often limited by what we know that we see – what we expect to see – instead of what is actually in front of us. This can be particularly challenging when photographing the nude, a subject dominated by preconceptions.
The nude, more than any other subject, is the most popular in the history of art, and possibly the most controversial. Artists have been fascinated with the body since the Venus de Willendorf, a small statue estimated to be over 20,000 years old, through the Greek and Roman period of idealising the body, Michelangelo’s David, Edward Weston’s famous nudes, Robert Mapplethorpe’s explicitly erotic nudes, and through the late 20th-century views of sexualised images influenced by Madison Avenue, Hollywood, and Playboy glamour.
We already have a myriad of preconceptions as to what a nude should look like, what is a beautiful nude, what is appropriate, what is not appropriate, what is tasteless, what is offensive, and so on. All of this contributes to the nude as an incredibly powerful and popular subject, while at the same time an extremely challenging one and difficult to see in an original way’ – Connie Imboden
We will use local models for this workshop.
ABOUT CONNIE IMBODEN:
Connie Imboden has taught for over 30 years, as faculty at The Maryland Institute College of Art as well as instructing various workshops and institutions throughout the United States, France, the Czech Republic and the United Arab Emirates.
Her photographs have been exhibited in an extensive range of group and solo shows at galleries and museums across the Americas, Europe, and China and are in museum collections around the world including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Bibliothèque Nationales in Paris, France, and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany.
Her first book entitled “Out of Darkness” with essays by Charles–Henri Favrod and A.D. Coleman, won the Silver Medal in Switzerland’s “Schonste Bucher Aus Aller Welt (Most Beautiful Book in the World)” Award in 1993. Her fourth and most recent monograph, “Reflections; 25 Years of Photography”, was published in 2009 by Insight Editions with essays by Arthur Ollman, Julian Cox and John Wood.