Freezing a moment in time can be a heady experience. But freezing the “decisive moment” is truly magical. Our mission in this workshop is to develop precise techniques for capturing these “magic moments” in the public domain, unobtrusively and at close range. We begin by exploring why the elements of chance, time, and place, as well as your particular point of view, are essential to this type of personal photography.

After an introductory lecture and portfolio review on the morning of the first day, we venture out onto the streets of Santa Fe to photograph. Working in the tradition of street photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, your mission is to not simply photograph what things look like, but to photograph how you feel about them. Your reward is discovering the magic of combining people, place, and moment in well-crafted and carefully composed images.

Like good athletes, we force ourselves to get outside our comfort zones and to practice the necessary combinations of technique, craft, and artistry that enable us to capture the magic moments that lead to compelling images. With daily assignments to photograph and constructive critiques of your images in class, you develop your natural and intuitive photographic instincts. Our successes and near misses serve as topics of discussion about how we can improve our photography by applying different strategies and sensitivities to our personal vision. Throughout it all we strive to pluck personal poems from the raw material of daily life.