Cameraless Photography: Creating Magic with Alternative Processes
In this class, you’ll explore alternative processes that redefine the boundaries of traditional photography through creativity and sustainability. Simplicity takes center stage as you’re guided through cameraless and analog techniques that can be quickly mastered with easy-to-obtain materials. You’ll learn to create photographic art from home — chemigrams, lumen prints, phytograms, and film soup — without the need for an analog camera or darkroom access. Discover low-cost alternatives that not only make these methods accessible but also encourage sustainable practices through the use of reusable and recycled materials. Through lecture, demonstration, and group discussion, students will produce a diverse array of prints. The culmination of your efforts will lead to the creation of either a final standout piece or a compelling small series, which you’ll present during the final class session.
Students will receive a list of easy-to-obtain materials that you’ll need for the class when you register.
Daura Campos is an artist and educator based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Through experimental techniques, her work investigates the dynamics of perception, interpretation, and memory, treating photographic film and paper as active collaborators in image-making.
Her work has been exhibited at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (CICA Museum), Rotterdam Photo, MK Gallery, Pinakothek der Moderne, Open Eye Gallery, Gallery 44, Museo de Arte de Pereira, and Experimental Photo Festival. She has been recognized by the 2025 Tokyo International Foto Awards (TIFA), the 2024-2025 International Photography Awards (IPA), and the 2024-2025 Analog Sparks International Film Photography Awards.
She has led courses, workshops, and lectures at various cultural organizations, including the Museu da Imagem e do Som (MIS), Festival de Arte Analógica de São Paulo (FAASP), Espaço Força e Luz, StrudelmediaLive, Santa Fe Workshops, Alternative Processes, and The Alternative Art School.
Campos is the Communications and Digital Media Manager of the Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) and holds a Bachelor of Social Communication, Film and Media from PUC Minas.
Daura teaches alternative processes for StrudelmediaLive.
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.