I always hated hosting photography workshops, till I changed one thing
I remember in 2010 hosting my first workshop. It was in a small London studio, showing how to make a ‘levitation’ photo. Essentially, for £99 I’d show you how to take two photos on a tripod and Photoshop out the supporting chair of a girl laying like a corpse upon it.
Ok, it was more than that, it was about trying to show the magic that goes into making a fine-art photo, and the participants got at least a peephole, At other times, turning my artmaking into a ‘step by step’ was a bit like being watched while making love and failing to climax unless the onlookers turned the other way.
But how thrilling to make wonga from anything photography-related after the recession of 2008, after all, I’d only just graduated from my English degree two years earlier. Every photographer and his dog were doing workshops, even I who was just getting to grips with the functions of a camera after having used Auto settings for most of my self-portraits that catapulted me to hyped fame through flickr.
I was ardent from the start that I wanted to be an artist, not a teacher, but brave is the photographer who shuns the workshop market completely, especially in this even worse, silent recession of 2025 where any real work available threatens to be ousted by AI. But from the start of doing workshops, my partner Matt and I had the notion that the participants might be bored by the paparazzi format, and want more than to worship at the shrine of the hosting artist.
So in 2011 we tried something different. We hired a large venue and styled a model for each of five sets that participants would rotate around without any teaching. A shoot-out, essentially, where the locations and team required warranted a much higher ticket price, but beckoned a surprisingly long queue of both amateur and pro shooters who didn’t want their hands held.
We went on to do six years of them in New York, LA, France, Lanzarote, and Iceland. Our last one was a week of six naked models in Tuscany, our last phwoaring-hurrah before Covid happened and we assumed we’d never be able to do stints like that again.
Logistically, the shoots needed months of organization, and the ticket price often limited our clientele to white-collar professionals with a high disposable income (a young amateur might only make it thanks to a generous uncle or windfall) but what the participant got from it, testimonial after testimonial attested, was better than any workshop they’d been to. They were real cameraderies (see what I did there? My English degree wasn’t wasted!) They were exhausting, they were all-consuming, and we’d usually splurge most of the budget on production I could make my own body of work from, Surreal Fashion.
We spent the next eight years having two daughters, watching the £5 sandwich-at-a-service-station post-covid world pretend to be normal again, and wondering whether anyone is still switching on a camera – in the face of the AI app even I have on my phone – till one day Matt logged into Facebook, after nearly a decade of deactivation, and found our clients up for the idea of another event.
We fancy dusting off our camera, taking to the skies again and maybe even making a few quid for the gas bill, but the main thing we miss is the buzz. The social gathering. The kind of stuff I think people will need more than ever in a post-socially distanced, money-cautious, virtual meta world.
Like I said about a scene I shot underwater in the Cayman Islands as the base for CGI piece, “Such an effort could be created easily by AI these days – without the nauseous bobbing on a boat at dawn, buying expensive underwater camera housing, or worrying your model will be decimated by a jellyfish – but the breakfast afterwards really wouldn’t taste as good, would it?”
So, after a 2024 of personal and professional woes, watching people I never knew even had tear ducts crying with anxiety, counting the blessings of everything we’ve been lucky to experience in our career… we’re diving back into the deep end of hurrying the lipstick on five models at Captain Barnes’ House in New York in April.
We’re coming back to our Fashion Shoot Experience, feeling grateful in 2025 that I can call myself a photographer, teacher or businesswoman at all. We’re also taking on a workshop in a Swiss castle where I will be quite happy to divulge in every intimate stroke to my artmaking if it means preserving something of that old world. And thus is our New Year Resolution for 2025: Let’s Get Physical… Again. Well, in the school holidays at least.
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