Anti-Workshop Day 1: Elvis!

Well, finally I’ve grabbed a few moments to upload some photos of what I’ve been doing this week. Today was the last full day of the anti-workshop and it has been an absolutely amazing experience for me. I have felt like a sponge for the past few days trying to soak up as much information as I possibly can, furiously taking notes and attempting to cram everything into my poor brain. Every night I’ve fallen into my bed wrung out and exhausted but in a very good way. I won’t blog everything at once so for this post I’ll just show what we did on the first day of the workshop.

After a morning spent talking about looking at all kinds of art to inspire and inform our photography, we were split into groups of 5, given a life-size cardboard cut-out of Elvis a polaroid camera and sent out onto the streets of downtown Las Vegas with the challenge to come up with a concept and execute it using only ten images. We had only 90 minutes and 2 packs of film to work with. Our team worked so well together. So many times you do something like this and there are strong personalities who butt against each other or take over. We all seemed to be quite evenly matched and we had a great time. It was a brilliant exercise because it forced us to think beyond camera settings or lens choices and just get good pictures that told a story. We chose the theme of the contrast between Elvis at his height and at his lowest. It sounds all deep but we just had fun.

You can see our images here in this post. All of them were taken within a radius of about 4 blocks in the downtown area which is a colourful part of town to say the least. The shot in the bathroom was taken in the not very pleasant motel room of a guy who we spotted at a motel pool, I was standing in my bare feet on his toilet seat while Jen, one of the other girls on the team sat with her feet up on the bath. The one with Elvis standing in the street has an ambulance in the background that was working on a guy laid out on the sidewalk. The sportscar belonged to a guy with greased backed hair, wearing leather pants and gold jewelery…his girlfriend is in the front seat. The final one was when we set fire to Elvis which we did down an alley…just as he was blazing nicely we were spotted by some security across the road and we had to run for it. Definitely a fun first day! Tomorrow morning we’re off to the Neon Graveyard for the final part of the workshop, I’m so sad that it’s nearly over!