Image Text Workshop

Image Text Workshop

6 weeks

Saturdays 12:00 pm-1:45pm, 2:15pm-4:00 pm EST

Spring 2022 session: May 21–June 25

Open to all ages and levels; limited to 16 students.

$600

This six-week online workshop, collaboratively taught with Pamela Sneed, provides a platform for artists to explore the relationship between writing and photography. All photographs are ambiguous, irrefutable as evidence but weak in meaning. Words by themselves remain generalizations, but together they are powerful assertions that generate narrative possibilities.  They can march in literary formation where photographs function as sentences and written language assumes a visual shape, or they could interrupt one another, creating a third thing through the disturbance. A project might be fueled by research or fed by poetry; a narrative might animate the stillness of a photograph. Whether aware or not, we are forever assigning words to pictures and pictures to words.

This workshop is based on creation and critique, exploring the powerful ways that image and text can live together. Students present work each week and are given constructive feedback. We will come together in the spirit of experimentation and play, to learn from and support one another. Assignments and readings will be offered as prompts or inspiration but are not required. Students are encouraged to shape self-generated projects based on their own value and attention. The class is open to all levels, to participants at all stages, whether you are just starting out or want to refine an existing body of work. The goal of the workshop is to develop a working practice based on a process of making, thinking, and remaking. There will be no final presentation in this workshop as we would like to stress the idea of continuity rather than an end goal.

The students will be split into two groups and will alternate between writing classes with Pamela Sneed and photography classes with myself. There will be eight students in your group. Each group will meet with Pamela and myself three times. I am also available to offer Photoshop tutorials for beginning users.

Necessary equipment and programs not provided: computer, hard drive, camera, and Adobe Creative Cloud Suite. 

Justine Kurland (born in Warsaw, New York, 1969) received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and an MFA from Yale University. She has taught photography at Yale University and Parsons University and currently teaches at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College. Her work is in the public collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, and Museum of Modern Art, New York, among other institutions. Her monographs Highway Kind, 2016, and Girl Pictures, 2020, were published by Aperture. SCUMB Manifesto, published by Mack, will be out in May.

Pamela Sneed is a New York based poet, performer, and visual artist. She is the author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams, and Funeral Diva published by City Lights in October 2020. She has published in The Paris Review, Frieze Magazine, Art Forum, The Academy of American Poets, and more. She has contributed an essay to Nona Faustine’s book White Shoes and Leeza Meksin’s Turret Tops. Pamela wrote the preface to Simon(e) Van Saarloos’ Take ‘Em Down, forthcoming in 2022. Her visual work was featured in the group show Omniscient at Leslie Lohman Museum. She is the narrator for Coco Fusco’s short film in the 2022 Whitney Biennial.

Funeral Diva was featured in the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Lit Hub, Art Net, and elsewhere. It won the 2021 Lambda Lesbian Poetry Award and was recommended by The New York Times alongside Barack Obama’s memoir. 

Pamela has spoken at Bard Center for Humanities, The Ford Foundation, The Gordon Parks Foundation, Columbia University, The New School, New York Public Library, The Brooklyn Museum, MOMA, DIA, as well as NYU’s Center for Humanities. In 2021, she was a panelist for The David Zwirner Gallery’sMore Life exhibit.

photo credit by Justine Kurland