Telling Stories with Intimacy | A Documentary Workshop
More info via SDN Education
6:30-9:00pm Eastern via Zoom
Eight Thursdays beginning Sept. 23, 2021
Course fee: $600
Limited to eleven students
Scholarship information
The funeral of Sa'ad Yacoub Issa, 71, who died without a husband or children. The community came out to honor her passing with a traditional Greek Orthodox ceremony, which began in her home surrounded by the women of the village and ended in the old Byzantine church and then a procession to the cemetery.
Class Description
How do we prepare, as documentarians, to achieve intimacy in our work? And how do we prepare to experience and absorb the inevitable trauma of others? This workshop will be a mixture of the practical and the philosophical. In this 8+ week workshop, Ed will share work and ideas that address these central elements of doing impactful visual storytelling, while also reviewing the creative output of the participants in the safe, supportive and open environment that is emblematic of how Ed approaches his workshops. Participants will be challenged to dig deeper and produce work with intimacy and sensitivity. This workshop will challenge your humanity and consider the often difficult juggling act of handling your own emotions and the emotions of others. How can we produce work with intimacy while honoring and protecting the humanity of others.
What Ed has learned after 40 years is that you become not only a better documentarian but a better human being by embracing your trauma instead of running away from it. The importance of approaching subjects with sensitivity and respect is critical to doing this work ethically, and the importance of understanding your impact on the lives of subjects/collaborators, both in the field and in the final outcomes. Doing this work often puts us in close contact with the displaced and dispossessed. How do we function as documentarians and humans in this context?
The expectation of this workshop will be to push students to either continue an ongoing project, kickstart a new project or start and finish a manageable project. The focus will be on intimacy and delving into the lives of others. The approaches can be through still photography, video, writing, or other multidisciplinary forms of storytelling.
This workshop will also focus on the following: witnessing and absorbing trauma of others, narrative development, editing, advancing your visual sensibilities , forms of self-care, and gaining trust/access, but invariably the discussions will be broad and open-ended to serve the goals of the participants. The ultimate goal of this workshop is to advance your authorship and vision in telling stories with intimacy and sensitivity.
Registration Fee
$600 Total
Option to pay 25% deposit now with balance due one week before course starts.
Payment and Cancellation Policies
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