ONLINE COURSE
Handcrafting Light for Portraiture, Interiors, and Still Life
This class looks closely at lighting for photography and how best to manipulate and handcraft it. Through demonstrations and weekly assignments, students will learn how to use ambient and artificial light to illuminate subjects. Understanding how light behaves will allow us to manipulate it through reflection, diffusion, and blocking as we use common household items as well as readily available professional equipment. Portraiture, self-portraiture, environmental portraiture, interiors, and still life photography will be considered in this course. We will look for inspiration at a variety of artists who are successful at sculpting light in their works. Supported by in-class critique, this is a good opportunity to work on a project that involves the handcrafting of light, or simply experiment with different techniques each week.
Néstor Pérez-Molière was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and currently resides in the Bronx, New York. His art entails a process of self-discovery; a series of confessionals revealing private conflicts; hoping towards catharsis. Through this cathartic process he hopes to connect with the viewer’s struggles and depathologize negative feelings so that they can be seen as a source for political action rather than its antithesis. Néstor exposes mental health issues like depression, dysmorphia, food addictions, and loneliness: describing their mechanisms, scrutinizing their origins, and illuminating the impossibility of fixing them. His practice mainly takes place in the realm of photography but has also incorporated performance, drawing, video, installation, and intaglio techniques into his works.
He received an MFA from Hunter College and holds a BSc in Botany. He was part of EmergeNYC 2023, Artist in the Marketplace 2017, and Creative Capital’s Taller 2019 mentorship programs, and was included in The Bronx Museum of the Arts Fourth Biennial. He has exhibited at the Museo de las Américas, the Clemente Soto Vélez, Bronx Art Space, Longwood Gallery, and the Liga de Estudiantes de Artes de San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 2023 he was a resident at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Governors Island Arts Center and Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts residencies. Interested in becoming an educator, he teaches, and has taught, digital and darkroom photography, as well as media literacy at the International Center of Photography, Parsons School of Design, Art Academy of Cincinnati, Fairleigh Dickinson University, The Point CDC, and StrudelmediaLive.
Néstor teaches lighting for still life, Lightroom, and more for StrudelmediaLive.
ndpmoliere.com
