Swimtime

Olympic pool.

Ready to go!

Ready for Beijing

There are many ways to approach our trip: as a photography workshop; as a travel adventure; as an art tour; as a vacation. All of these are interconnected and, indeed, informed by each other.

Another goal, slightly larger perhaps, is to think about the meaning of culture itself, especially as pertains to the mixing up of cultural boundaries.

When I first started working in China, the idea of culture as a concrete entity captivated my imagination. For me, working in China made culture, and learning about culture, visible in ways I had never experienced. One of the many challenges that I set for myself, subsequently, was to investigate how my photography informed and influenced my understanding of what it meant to learn about learning itself.

My goal with our workshop is to invite you into a conversation on this topic. As we dip into Chinese culture these next two weeks, these are the questions that will animate our time together: What can experience teach us about the learning process? How can that process be documented? Why does the act of picture-making influence the way we think about a culture that we don't understand?