TAP INTO YOUR INNERMOST WORLD & CREATE IMAGES YOU’VE ONLY IMAGINED YOU COULD

The Secret Garden of Lily LaPalma, one weekend only, May 20 — 21, 2023.

Your instructors will be Guggenheim grant recipient & National Geographic photographer Maggie Steber, with Lucie awarded photographer Kerry Payne Stailey, and Sarah Leen, National Geographic Director of Photography Emeritus, and multi award winning photographer / editor.

In this workshop you’ll learn how to address personal stories, how to create portraits that go far beyond the ordinary and to explore new ways to express yourself visually. It’s about discovery and how your story can represent topics beyond what we normally do with photography.

The Secret Garden is your imagination, which as visual storytellers we must exercise. Learning to tell our own stories—be they dreams or nightmares or things you always wished for—can empower your work in many different ways. This workshop will stretch your imagination, your ideas, your work and your photographic future.

LEARN HOW TO IDENTIFY YOUR SUCCESSFUL PHOTOS WITH SARAH LEEN, DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY EMERITUS FOR NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE

On Day 1 we’ll spend a full day and evening making photographs that reflect your ideas, your stories, the things you love or the things that you might never have shared before.

On Day 2 we’ll meet to review your work under the guidance of Sarah Leen, an award winning photographer and editor who worked for many years with National Geographic Magazine, both as a photographer and as first woman to hold the title of Director of Photography at the magazine.   

This workshop offers you a chance to try something new that can have a powerful impact on the work you do on a regular basis.  We will incorporate nature in what you work on, including our surroundings of a beautiful lake, the woods, gardens, and hundreds of blooming cherry blossoms. We will have all kinds of props, fabrics, fake flowers, lighting in a studio and for outside as well.

You’ll have the freedom, the tools and the support to imagine and create. This weekend provides the opportunity for “once in a lifetime” creativity and exploration. 

ABOUT MAGGIE STEBER: Maggie Steber, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, has worked in 70 countries photographing stories on the human condition.

National Geographic Magazine named her a Women of Vision, and her monograph on Haiti is entitled Dancing on Fire.

Her numerous accolades include Pulitzer Prize Finalist, the President’s Award from the Overseas Press Club, the Lucie Award for Photojournalism, and the Leica Medal of Excellence, among many others. Exhibited worldwide, her work is included at the Library of Congress and the Guggenheim Foundation. Maggie has worked on staff at the Associated Press and The Miami Herald, as well as on a contract basis for Newsweek Magazine. 

For many decades Maggie told the stories in photographs of others, showing cultures, the histories of people and their experiences, both good and bad, of science and even personal stories that were her stories. She began to make different kinds of photographs that depicted her own experience in life, in what she saw, what she dreamt about, and things both dark and bright.  For this work she received support from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and it continues to grow and has had impact on new ways of telling stories.