Photographing History

Workshop with Simon Norfolk

Simon Norfolki Afghanistan Balloons

One of photography’s most interesting challenges is uncovering the histories that surround us. Visualizing these invisibles is just about the one useful task left for photography. Setting out with a visual medium to photograph what is not visible would seem, on the surface, to be foolishness, but when it's well done squaring this circle produces work, which sparkles and intrigues.
Many of these hidden histories are painful and for 20 years I've been interested in this 'hiddenness,' 'unsay-ability' and the wreckage the past leaves behind. For me, landscapes are archaeology sites as much as they are crime scenes. But what I say could also work for personal/family histories, or histories which are joyful and worthy of celebration.
If your photographic instinct is to go to Grandma's old house and photograph the dust in the corner or, even worse, take dull pictures of somewhere and then write long long long captions about how it's actually interesting then... well then you really need to do this workshop.
I’ll be talking about my own work, it’s inspirations (especially in the history of painting and philosophy from England in 18th century) and why I make my work look the way it does.

	Simon Norfolk

Simon Norfolk

He is a landscape photographer whose work over a dozen years has been themed around a probing and stretching of the meaning of the word 'battlefield' in all its forms. As such, he has photographed in some of the world's worst war-zones and refugee crises, but is equally at home photographing supercomputers used to design military systems or test-launches of nuclear missiles. His work has been widely recognised: he has won The Discovery Prize at Les Rencontres d'Arles in 2005; The Infinity Prize from The International Center of Photography in 2004; the Foreign Press Club of America Award in 2003: and he was winner of the European Publishing Award, 2002. In 2003 he was shortlisted for the Citibank Prize now known as the Deutsche Böurse Prize and in 2012 he won the Prix Pictet Commission. He has produced four monographs of his work including Afghanistan: chronotopia (2002) which was published in five languages; For Most Of It I Have No Words (1998) about the landscapes of genocide; and Bleed (2005) about the war in Bosnia. The most recent is Burke+Norfolk; Photographs from the War in Afghanistan. (2011).

He has work held in major collections such as The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and The Getty in Los Angeles. His work has been shown widely and internationally and in 2011 his Burke+Norfolk work was a solo show at Tate Modern.

He has been described by one critic as 'the leading documentary photographer of our time. Passionate, intelligent and political; there is no one working in photography that has his vision or his clarity.'

www.simonnorfolk.com

 

Workshop Information:

• 2-day wokshop, May 13th to 14th 2016, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.
• Participants: max 12
• Language English
• Location: Z. Tsereteli Museum of Modern Art. 27 Rustaveli Ave
• Price 200 Euro

For detailed information ( also infos on flights and hotels) please contact
Tina Schelhorn: tinaschelhorn@web.de, +49 178 565 11 49