WRITING FROM WITHIN YOUR WORK

This workshop invites photographic artists to explore what it means to write from within their own practice, drawing directly from the impulses, questions, and lived experiences that shape their work.

Through guided prompts, discussion, and critique, participants will work toward developing a writing voice that feels both personal and cohesive with their images. The focus is not on conforming to standard formats, but on uncovering language that resonates with the idiosyncratic motivations behind each artist’s process and pictures.

Participants will attend an online class on September 16th and be given a writing assignment. This assignment will serve as the foundation for the in-person workshop on September 24th, where participants will share their texts alongside their photographic work. Together, the group will engage in thoughtful critique, considering how language and image can more fully align.

This workshop is ideal for photographers seeking to deepen their relationship to writing, whether for artist statements, books, exhibitions, or simply as a way of better understanding their own practice.

This workshop is capped at 12 participants.

About the Instructor

Tim Carpenter is a photographer, writer, and educator who works in Brooklyn and central Illinois. He is the author of several photobooks, among them Little (The Ice Plant); A month of Sundays (TIS books); Christmas Day, Bucks Pond Road (The Ice Plant); Local objects (The Ice Plant); township (TIS/dumbsaint); Bement grain (TIS/dumbsaint); Still feel gone (Deadbeat Club Press); The king of the birds (TIS books); and A house and a tree (TIS books). Tim received an MFA in Photography from the Hartford Art School in 2012. He is a faculty member of the Penumbra Foundation Long Term Photobook Program and serves as a mentor in the Image Threads Mentorship Program. Tim’s book-length essay “To photograph is to learn how to die” was published by The Ice Plant in Fall 2022.