ONLINE COURSE
The Life You’re In: The Joy and Pathos of Autobiography
This course will help students step back from their own unfolding stories and create work about their life, whether based on memories or the current situation. Memory exercises will unlock personal material — interests, preoccupations, and connections to current circumstances — to help find a productive direction. Learning to be specific and authentic is key; fears, inhibitions, and practical obstacles will be discussed and confronted to allow students to mine their most compelling experiences. Many references will be made to contemporary photography, as well as to examples from the history of photography, art, and film. Any subject is viable as long as the photographer is sufficiently moved by it. Form follows content, and the photographer’s choice of approach will be analyzed for its applicability and expressiveness.
Allen Frame is a photographer and writer, based in New York and represented by Gitterman Gallery. He has released four books of photography: Whereupon (Palermo Publishing, 2023); Innamorato (Meteoro Editions, 2023); Fever, (Matte Editions, 2021); and Detour, (Kehrer, 2001). Currently, his work appears in the exhibition Mexichrome at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. His two-person exhibition Lost and Found was presented at Soft Network in New York, in November. He is a winner of the 2017/2018 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and CEC Artslink’s Back Apartment Residency in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2019. He has curated numerous exhibitions, including Luxe, Calme, Volupte, which he co-curated with Sergio Bessa at Candice Madey Gallery in 2023. He is an Adjunct Professor of Photography at Pratt Institute (MFA) and also teaches at the School of Visual Arts (BFA), the International Center of Photography in New York, and for StrudelmediaLive.
Allen teaches “The Life You’re In: The Joy and Pathos of Autobiography” for StrudelmediaLive.