workshop: time, narrative and photography

Media - photography
Date: September 2007
Location: Beddawi Camp, North Lebanon
Facilitator: Maya Mekdashi and Fadi Baki
Participants: 11

View photo-narratives >>

The goals of this workshop were to teach the participants basic digital camera techniques and to explore with them the relationship between time, photography, and narrative. To that end, both digital point-and shoot-cameras and Polaroid cameras were employed to think and work through the marriage between aesthetics and content. The workshop participants and facilitators engaged in a series of exercises and group discussions on photography as a medium of both representation and communication. Example exercises included a series of photographs on ‘loss’, ‘memory’ and the creation of a story using first 10, then five, pictures.

The four-day workshop culminated in the production of individual final projects. The final project was to be a visual exploration of the concepts of ‘time’ and ‘the archive’. The project consisted of a photo-essay composed of three photographic triptychs. Each photo triptych contained one photograph representing the past of a chosen theme, its’ present manifestation, and the future that the two preceding photographs could lead, or open, into. Participants could choose to begin with a photograph of the ‘future’ and then work backwards, or to begin with the past or the present and build towards the future or the past. Each triptych in the series was composed of different photographs, all representing alternative unfoldings of the past, present and possible futures of the chosen theme.

The logic that links each photograph to the next in each triptych series is the work of storytelling, while the logic that links each triptych of photographs to the next is that of alterity and possibility. It was left to the participant to decide the subject, composition, and setting of the photographs.

The aim of this workshop was to question the process of time and documentation by stretching the horizon of the multiple possible futures open to us at every point, of which only one will sediment (owing to a host of factors) into being. By creatively and critically thinking through the process of narrative and incorporating these story-telling tools into photo essays clustered around real-life and real actor themes, the workshop facilitators and participants began to interrogate the ways that official histories and archives, of both peoples and individuals, are constructed.

<< back to workshops