An exploration of personal histories through photography

Working with photo collections provided by the participants themselves this, workshop will begin a process of researching, recording and re-imagining personal histories. The people and places shown in family albums, holiday snaps and private photo collections each tell different, interwoven histories of Nepal. What narratives can be built from these photographs? What will be discovered when the places they show are revisited, re-photographed, and the people in them are able to re-tell the story of the photograph’s origins?

This photography workshop embraces digging up albums and old photographs, recording oral histories and analyzing and contemporizing the collected material with the aim of further photographing the people and places depicted.

This is a photography workshop that sets the tone to try and work with visual material collected, often personal and hidden, residing within homes of families or institutions in the form of albums and loose photographs. A modest start to begin piecing together unseen images that will serve as a visual reading of an alternative history of a culture and people.

By collecting, analyzing, digitizing and recording what the participants are able to bring together or find, this workshop endeavours to put together an important visual historical project that can also be a starting point for further work. In this workshop, images of people and places in the found material will serve as a point of reference for further investigation and development – for example a street scene or a group shot that may have been shot 50 years ago can be looked at again today and re-photographed. These serve as important markers of a vernacular history, memory and storytelling that goes beyond the official history of a country, looking instead more personally at a city, a neighborhood, a street, and the people that inhabit it.

The workshop will focus on the people and places in these photographs. Who are they? What are their stories? What is the memory their offspring carry on and how can all of this be photographed and put together with a focus on building visual and oral histories? Based on the outcome of the material participants bring in, they will be encouraged to use the camera to document the existing material digitally, record oral histories and further photograph the people and places from where this material originates.

The aim of the workshop is for participants to become familiar with the idea that there can be many parallel narratives that a country, its people and places can have, beyond the recorded and broadcasted official history. At the end of the workshop all collected and created material will be collated to produce an exhibition so that participants can share and review how the material has come together collectively.

ABOUT THE TUTOR 

Pablo Bartholomew is an award-winning Indian documentary photographer and photography educator based in New Delhi. As keeper of both his father’s oeuvre of over 17,000 negatives as well as his own practice (the consequence of a four-decade- long engagement with photography) Bartholomew has been forced to assume the role of archivist. In addition to this he has his collection of vintage glass plates, negatives, prints, albums that has made him look at his own practice in relationship to all the other material that he has collected over the years.

WHO SHOULD APPLY?

Photographers, historians, and anyone with an inquisitive mind, and old photographs. OPEN TO ALL.

WORKSHOP DETAILS

Date: 14 – 18 October 2016
Venue: Yala Maya Kendra, Patan Dhoka
Time: 10am – 5pm (14 October) and 10am – 3pm (15 – 18 October)
Language: English
No. of participants: max. 10

APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS 

• To apply, please fill an application form and submit a sample of work that you would like to work on during this workshop.
• Please email the above mentioned to workshops@photoktm.com. Subject of your email should be the title of the workshop. If the size of the attachments is more than 10mb, please send files via WeTransfer.

WORKSHOP FEE 

Rs. 4,000 + 13% VAT (for Nepalis) | US$100 (for Rest of World)

DEADLINE EXTENDED 

5 October 2016