Throughout history, people have gone to the desert hoping to see life, themselves, and their surroundings anew. As photographers, we strive to create images that capture the underlying mystery of a seemingly ordinary place. The goal of this workshop is to learn to observe more deeply, and to find and capture such images in the desert landscape through a combination of intuition and perception. For the first part of the week we are based in Lone Pine and the second part of the workshop is based at Stovepipe Wells, letting us explore a variety of locations in and around Death Valley.
The Contemplative Landscape’s essence seeks to capture both the known and the unknown aspects of a landscape by combining intuition and perception. It strives to be “concept free” and allows photographers to engage the mystery of the world, reality, and their interior heavens. Its end product seeks a wholeness out of which we can photograph and express truly what we feel about the fundamental reality that exists in front of us. We have seen, over the years, people’s lives and photography change in the course of the workshop. It often broadens a person’s spiritual life, although each one brings their own beliefs to the workshop, and all are welcome.
The Contemplative Landscape begins with awareness exercises in photography that we have developed over the past 40 years. These skills include standing and walking mindfulness that put you in the moment. Perceptual skills then offer primary access to the actual visual working of the human eye-brain system, the tool with which we create our images. The perceptual exercises pull you away from the defeating process of copying landscape images made by others and help you concentrate on what you see. Lastly, we finish with a series of Visual Koans, riddles about reality that can only be answered by your authentic response to the reality in front of you and not by rational discourse. The Contemplative Landscape is taught in places known for their solitude and beauty. Digital cameras are preferred since film processing services are not available. We will not be using computers as such, but students are encouraged to bring their laptops to store and view their images.
The Contemplative Landscape workshop seeks simplicity, wholeness, peace, and grace. It attempts to make a clean break from the accepted conventional world where we usually live and casts us into the “spiritual desert” of ourselves.
This popular workshop will be held in Lone Pine and Death Valley, California, from March 2 to 7, 2009. Because of the individual nature of the workshop we limit enrollment to 15 people only. We will be staying at Dow Villa Motel in Lone Pine and at Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley. Travel and housing accommodations arrangements should be made by each individual. We will visit the Eureka Dunes, Death Valley Dunes, Zabriski Point, and elsewhere as we photograph each day, subject to weather and road conditions.
On a typical day in the early morning we’ll be shooting dawn light on the desert. After breakfast comes a lecture on various aspects of landscape photography technique, history, and ideas. Later in the afternoon we’ll pick another location for evening light photography. We will combine the contemplative exercises with landscape photography practice from both Western and Eastern ideas of landscape composition.
The workshop includes opportunities to view one another’s work and to talk individually about our own images with the instructors. Throughout, our emphasis is on the contemplative process of making images rather than on technical details or typical photographic locations.
Please call us at 207-244-0966 or 207-266-5493 for more details. Cost for the workshop is $1295.
Cordially,
George DeWolfe and Lydia Goetze
Lydia Goetze
PO Box 429
Southwest Harbor, Maine 04679
207-244-5493
lydiagoetze@roadrunner.com
