Confronting Images

Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Chennai in cooperation with Chennai Photo Biennale Foundation invites participants to register for a 3 day workshop on Contemporary Photography Workshop by Michael Schäfer, Berlin.

Concept: Television, internet, newsprint: media images belong to our visual environment as much as any object or person around us. They are part of our reality, they enter our private sphere and they influence our thinking and how we act. But our role towards these images and their „rhetoric“, codes and subliminal messages is predominantly a passive one.

In this workshop you will confront selected media images with photographs that you take yourself as a form of reaction or answer to them. The starting point for the artistic work will be media images which could be anything from a scene of a TV series to a news picture of a war zone.

• What is the meaning of these images?
• How do they affect us?
• How do they relate to our own life?
• How can we use photography to question these images and to create a counter-image? 

In a first step each participant will identify those kinds of media images she or he feels drawn to work with. You will then choose among various ways of how to appropriate these images and how to take photographs which echo, comment or contradict these media images. Finally we will work on forms of presentation on the wall in which the printed out media images and photographs together will establish a visual dialog.

• Age Limit: The workshop is open to all interested people aged 16 and above.
• Requirements

1. mobile phone/tablet and/or laptop for research online
2. pre-installed photoshop/photo editing software on laptop/tablet/mobile phone
3. attendance all on all days mandatory

• Cost: Nil (Lunch provided all 3 days)
• Participation via application (details below)
• Last date for application: 1st November 2019 
• Selected participants will be informed by 6th November

About the mentor:

Michael Schäfer’s approach to photography is a form of artistic mimicry, a way of appropriating images so as to deconstruct them. The artist’s gaze fixes on the over-determination of press images, their surplus of meaning and significance that literally presents the viewer with a historical and political constellation as a finished and closed interpretation. Schäfer’s works have been shown in solo exhibitions, including at Kunstverein Konstanz, Zephyr in Mannheim, and Kunstverein Leipzig. He has also exhibited in numerous group exhibitions, including at Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, C / O Berlin, Fotohof Salzburg and Centre de laPhotographie Geneva. In 2011 his artist’s book Models was published in the Fotohof edition.

Michael Schäfer was born in 1964 in Sigmaringen and lives and works in Berlin. He studied photography design at Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and photography at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts. Michael Schäfer was an artistic staff in Leipzig and today teaches at Hartford Art School, Connecticut and the Berlin University of the Arts.

How to apply

• Send email to workshops@chennaiphotobiennale.com
• Subject: Application for ‘Confronting Images’ Workshop
• Body:

1. Name:
2. Age:
3. Occupation:
4. Attach your current CV
5. For Student(s)

• Name of School/University (if applicable):
• Which year of the course in currently:
• Name of course: