Acts of Seeing: Slow Looking and the Photographer’s Eye
This course invites you to engage in “slow looking” — a mindful practice that encourages you to pause, engage all of your senses, and connect more deeply with your subject before making any photographic decisions. The goal is to move beyond automatic image-making and to sharpen your perceptual awareness to create images with greater clarity, presence, and intention.
To put our focus firmly on the act of seeing photographically, we’ll explore each week one key principle from John Szarkowski’s seminal text “The Photographer’s Eye”— subject, detail, framing, time, vantage point, and the decisive moment. Through discussion of your work in progress and that of photographers who emphasize sustained observation, we’ll examine how mindful engagement with your subject can lead to more thoughtful and thought-provoking images. This course is for photographers who want to develop a more reflective practice that enhances compositional skills, sharpens focus, and deepens the understanding of how their work might be perceived by others.
Marianne Holm Hansen is a Danish artist based in London. She studied at the Fynske Academy of Fine Arts (Denmark), International Center of Photography (New York), and completed an MA in Interactive Media: Critical Theory and Practice, at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has worked internationally as an editorial photographer, photography lecturer and educator, and today collaborates continuously with institutions such as Tate Modern and the Royal Institute of British Architects (London) to deliver workshops and projects that invite participants to engage critically and creatively across media and themes.
Marianne’s work is shown internationally through exhibitions, publications, and live events. She has received awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (New York) and Arts Council England, amongst others, and held research and production residencies in the UK, USA, France, Finland, and Serbia. Her most recent book, Void As (A) – A Proposition, collates photographs with texts to propose a series of prompts for thinking differently about language, time and space.
Marianne teaches combining image and text, how to use architectural space to tell a story, and more for StrudelmediaLive.
criticalm.org/
