Getting Ready to Risk it All: Empathic Vision

with Linda zhengová and Uiler Costa-Santos

Uiler Costa-Santos and Linda Zhengová are pleased to announce a six-day workshop from February 17–22, 2025 in the vibrant city of Salvador, Bahia. This workshop is designed to deepen your understanding of your role and intentions as a photographer while developing your skills in empathetic storytelling.

Throughout the workshop, participants will engage in a variety of activities including lectures, discussions, and group feedback sessions. You will have the opportunity to create a new body of work inspired by the rich offerings of Salvador, with guidance and support from both Uiler and Linda.

Key themes of the workshop include:

• Connecting Through Photography: Learn how to make meaningful connections with strangers and tell stories in unconventional ways.

• Questioning Intention and Position: Follow your instincts while critically examine your motives and position as a photographer.

• Editing and Sequencing: Learn techniques for editing and sequencing your photographs to convey tension effectively, enhance emotional impact, and align your work with your intentions and authentic perspective.

• Lectures and References: Gain insight from lectures and references to photography, books, and films, enriching your creative process.

• Exploring Tension and Intensity: Delve into the unique energy of Salvador, particularly in the lead-up to the explosive carnival season.

• Diversity and Immersion: Explore the diverse facets of Salvador, offering local photographers a fresh perspective and foreign photographers an immersive experience in a foreign culture.

This workshop is not just about creating images, but mostly about personal growth and self-reflection as an artist. It's an opportunity to confront any doubts or questions you may have about forming a meaningful relationship with your projects and infusing your work with realness.

Join us for a fun, yet confronting journey of exploration, learning, and mutual artistic growth in one of Brazil's most dynamic cities.

“I would like to teach you how to listen to your gut feeling which will become your major navigator when making photographs. Also, through honesty, openness and realness, I aim us to arrive at mutual truth. This is an intense process that will be then directly reflected in your images, piercing your audience. We will be making images that are not necessarily beautiful to look at but rather, they do something to us, they evoke a visceral reaction and make us remember. We go beyond the surface; and I can't wait to reach that point with you.” 
—Linda Zhengová

Through my practice and experience as a photographer, I want to contribute to your search for purpose and the creation of meaning in the production of images. Photography as a language, when tensioned, reveals multiple layers of complexity, serving as a powerful tool for questioning and understanding various social experiences. At a time when structural violence seems to be pushing our subjectivities and socio-collective practices to the limits of extreme saturation, it seems urgent to (re)think the fictional potential of images, as well as their ability to tell us about our belonging, territories and places through new paths of imagination. My aim is to encourage an ethical approach to people, communities and nature, always with the aim of elevating them, creating images that produce more questions than answers.
—Uiler Costa-Santos

Dates:

February 17-22, 2025

Schedule

Day 1
09:00–10:00: Welcome & Introductions
10:00–11:00: Presentation by Uiler Costa-Santos
11:30–12:30: Presentation by Linda Zhengová
13:30– Late: Portfolio reviews → identifying what points to focus on in the next coming days

Day 2
09:00-10:00 Presentation by Marina Muniz (guest lecturer)
10:00–15:00: Shooting time
16:00–18:00: Create a presentation of images you made

Day 3
10:00–14:00: Group Presentations & Feedback
16:00–Late: Shooting Time

Day 4
10:00–13:00: Create a presentation of images you made
14:00–16:00: Feedback
17:00–Late: Based on feedback either shoot more/start editing

Day 5
10:00–18:00: Editing & Sequencing Workshop and Group Zine

Day 6
18:00–Late Celebration & Goodbye drinks

Group size

08-12 people

Artists:

Linda Zhengová

Linda Zhengová is a Czech photographer and writer currently based in Amsterdam. She uses the medium of photography to challenge the existing boundaries and taboos surrounding the themes of representation, sexuality, and trauma. Her works are an intersection of academic and visual research. At the moment, she is editorially contributing to GUP Magazine, FRESH EYES, Extra Extra and Discarded Magazine, platforms showcasing the developments of contemporary photography. She is the author of The Ambiguity of Visual Representations of Trauma (2020), Catharsis (2021) and Katabasis (2023). She is also the curator of XXX a publication of Discarded Magazine showcasing the vision of contemporary erotic photography.

Uiler Costa-Santos

Uiler Costa-Santos is a Brazilian photographer, visual artist and educator, lives and works in Salvador, Brazil. Through photography and the study of images, his research seeks to interlace the imagination of the landscape and the politics of redistribution of the senses through abstraction. His work uses images as aesthetic vehicles, and he employs them as tools to offer the body different perceptual experiences based on common, everyday spaces, returning to it the potentialities of geo-political imagination. Since 2017 the artist has dedicated himself to the series “Sizigia”, a project using aerial photography of the Itaparica channel, a region on the coast of Bahia, in which he traces different reliefs and movements of the tide creating new ways to interpret the local landscape. In 2022 he held the solo exhibitions Cosmologia da maré baixa [Cosmology of low tide] (Galeria Babel-SP) and Coroas [Crowns] (Museu de Arte da Bahia-BA). His group exhibitions include the Rencontres de Bamako Photography Biennial 2022-2023. Since 2015 he has taught photography courses with an emphasis on technique and poetic research.

Book:

€550 - R$3000,00 reais

Terms and Conditions apply

Payment Plans
We offer the possibility to pay in two or four installments over a four-month period.

Deadline to book: September 30, 2024

Contact:

If you have any questions about this workshop, please contact us:

info@lindazhengova.com (in English)
info@uiler.com (in English / Portuguese)