Tanya Marcuse : The Body (part 1)

Tanya Marcuse, an internationally exhibited photographer whose work centers on the body and historical objects related to it, taught this weekend’s workshop. She received her MFA from Yale and soon after was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship. Despite the fact that she has many other fellowships and publications under her belt, she is one of the most personable and down to earth artists I’ve met. Kelsea and I had an incredibly honest conversation with her at the Len Prince and Jesse Mann opening at Photosensualis. She gave us some really great advice about what it means to be a female artist in today’s world. We discussed the difference between having a career, having a life, and having both.

This was my first time dealing with nude models in photography…so I was a bit unsure about the weekend. Tanya made everything very comfortable and interesting. I haven’t ever truly had an interest in photographing nudes, but I now appreciate and understand many aspects of the theory and symbolism behind it. We had some good conversations about how a small piece of clothing can sometimes mean more than none, how environment greatly affects the image, and how to approach a model. Tanya was a really great teacher.

Because I shot so many images from this weekend, I thought I would post them in two separate posts...1 with my documentation of the students and locations and 1 with the images I shot as a workshop participant. The workshop was structured so that we spent the morning at CPW going over student work and the afternoon on location shooting a handful of different models. The houses we went to were really wonderful, one with an amazing yard and another with an inside that you could photograph for years without capturing it all…

The group discussing their approach before we began shooting

Tanya advising Michael on his shot

Ray and our wonderful model, Amanda

Apparently I wasn’t able to deal with the nudes yet…so I bonded with the bunny =)

And Liz (my boss!) bonded with Bella

The second day we went to a house with an unbelievable amount of character. I admit, I abandoned my intern duties for a little bit in order to capture some of the uniqueness about it…

The owners had an incredible amount of books...there were literally rooms with every wall lined with full bookshelves...I would love to live there...

So it looks like this is possibly the only true documentation image I have from this day!