Applying Analog Principles to Digital Photography
In this 90-minute mini-workshop, you’ll learn how understanding photography through the principles of analog film and equipment can broaden your perspectives and creative possibilities — whether you’re a digital-based and/or a beginner photographer. Starting with an introduction to the history of analog film and its technological and artistic developments, Samanta will show you what’s so special about analog photography and why using it as a framework can change how you engage with images and make aesthetic decisions. She’ll also share how you can apply visual features and poetic sensibilities, create with slower workflows, and add experimental methodologies to your own practice. It can be illuminating to learn more about analog photography from a philosophical-fundamental-mindset angle instead of a specific process.
Samanta Ortega is a Brazilian artist, educator, and researcher working with expanded photography, eco-conscious photochemistry, and found archive. Creating images, narrative compositions, and interventions that consider how human and non-human beings collaborate, her multidisciplinary practice merges visual, plastic, and filmic arts with handicraft and darkroom techniques. She understands experimentalism as an ethical and aesthetic commitment in which different media and processes converge, and errors, decay, destruction, and remixes are valued agents of change that keep images alive.
In 2022, she created Alquimia Fotográfica, a public pedagogy initiative that hosts her research in ecology and alternative processes in the form of essays and independent publications. As an educator, she offers classes, talks, and participates in exhibits in several Brazilian artist-led spaces, analog photography and cinema festivals, and institutions including the Brazilian National Archive, São Paulo’s Historical Archive, IMS-Rio, SESC, and SESI. As well as contributing to independent projects, seminars, and presentations as a consultant and production assistant, Samanta was part of the jury and selection committees in the Inflamável-Super 8 and 16mm Film Festival (2024), Derli Barroso Prize (2025), and Prix Photo (2024–2026).
Samanta teaches alternative processes for StrudelmediaLive.