The powerful medium of photography allows us to manifest our personal stories. Stories told through photographs can come from a place of joy or pain, and they may be truthful or fictitious; the only essential factor is that they be intensely felt by their maker. The challenge is to avoid the universal and clichéd and, by seeking out the specific and the personal, to discover the unique. Using metaphor and symbolism, participants photograph across many genres—the found and the constructed, the landscape, the still life, the portrait, and the self-portrait—in order to articulate their narratives visually.

We devote the magical hours of early morning and late afternoon to making images so that our stories are told in beautiful light. The rest of the day is spent as a group in the classroom, writing, brainstorming picture ideas, critiquing images from the previous day, and viewing work by other artists who have used personal experience as a vehicle. Cig meets individually with each participant to discuss how to push his/her work further and avoid repetition.

Uncover the elements of your own story and learn how to make pictures that are, as Cig puts it, “about things not just of things.”