C´è Sempre un Motivo
Sicily, Italy 2006
Another intimate and important workshops (my fourth) during these heart felt Easter celebrations.
What becomes clearer every day, it’s that the importance of better guiding my students is closely related to my ability to continuously probe the same subjects over and over again. It’s the only plausible answer that I can provide myself with when I realize that the more I return to the same locations the more personal and deeper my images become and the better my ability to teach and motivate my students.
As usual, we worked very hard both in the act of taking pictures and during the daily editing sessions. I have to give credit to the special group of people who attended the course. Bob was returning for his second back-to-back Easter workshop; Keith, after a very good start in Oaxaca last year, was ready to challenge himself once again. The other students, although new ones, immediately realized that my editing standards were very high and they simply had to rise to the occasion. Very few images passed the first editing sessions. To give them a better understanding of what to expect from all the different processions, for the first time I shared with them some of the images that I had taken in the previous years. They were all surprised when they realized how few I had.
I urged my students to see “photographic” moments, to go beyond the mere recording of reality; I made them aware of the importance of justifying the whole frame; I pointed out that even a minor detail within the frame can greatly affect the outcome of an image.
As always, in the midst of all this hard work, we also enjoyed the amazing Sicilian food, the warmth of the people and the intensity of their religious belief. The students’ emotional outpour to my Special Period project presentation will be difficult to forget. Once again, this experience has gone far beyond the workshop’s expectations.
I’m very proud of the images selected. They show the students’ commitment and their photographic growth, their ability to see and create much more complex sophisticated photographs.
During our long discussions, I’d always point out that: “C’è sempre un motivo, that there is always a reason”(or maybe more than one) to explain the success or the failure of any given image. I said it so many times that in the end this sentence stuck as the name of this wonderful group. As always, generosity played a key role in this meeting of souls. Several students pledged their support due to my current plight by buying some of my images.
In the end, what it boils down to are the quintessential images that each student took. EB
