Speaking with Light: A Conceptual Approach to Alternative Processes - Summer 2023

This three-part workshop will invite participants to experiment, play, and consider new ways of using alternative photographic processes to express conceptual ideas. Students will be introduced to contemporary artists using alternative and experimental approaches to photography in their conceptual artistic practice including world-renowned artists such as Maria Martínez-Cañas, Izabela Pluta, and Joy Gregory. This workshop will provide a safe space to explore new ideas and encourage students to take risks in their creative practice. Using the experimental nature of alternative photographic processes, students will transform their concepts using their own technique of preference including but not limited to cyanotype, lumen printing, and phytograms (a technique that uses the internal chemistry of plants for the creation of images on photographic emulsion). We will address how symbolism, metaphor, and abstraction act as catalysts to activate the imagination. Students will learn to instigate and translate ideas using the magic of light and chemicals. This three-part workshop series is designed for photographers who wish to develop their ability to convey conceptual ideas through the use of alternative photographic processes. It will include lectures, group discussions, time to create a set of images, and critiques of work in progress.

INSTRUCTOR BIO
Elizabeth Ransom is an artist, researcher, and educator based between the Pacific Northwest and the South of England. She is the Founder and Director of Women Alternative Photography Group and a PhD candidate at the University for the Creative Arts (2019-2024). Ransom holds an MFA in Photography and a Post Graduate Certificate in Education from the University for the Creative Arts as well as a BA in Fine Arts from Western Washington University. She has previously taught on MFA and BA photography courses in the UK as well as a guest lecturer at Western Washington University, West Highland College UHI, and Frances Bardsley Academy for Girls in addition to teaching alternative photographic process workshops online and in-person at a variety of organizations. As an artist and researcher, Ransom takes from her own lived experiences of migration to explore homesickness and transnationality. Her research builds on theories of migration, place attachment, and declarative episodic memory, particularly from the perspective of the migrant woman. Her work has been exhibited internationally in the UK, India, Mexico, China and the US.

Image © Elizabeth Ransom