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| Photo by Russell Hart |
| Jay Maisel teaching at the new Maine Media Workshops. Click photo for more images. |
Jay Maisel has put his Maine Media Workshops class on the spot by asking its students to ask him questions. Most of the diverse photographers around the big table know him well enough at this point to hesitate, and they keep their mouths shut. But one brave class member takes the leap. "What colors are you attracted to?" she asks Maisel, one of photography's great colorists. "That's pathetic," he says, predictably but in good fun. "That's like asking what's your favorite f-stop. F-you?"
Maisel goes on to say that there's no such thing as good or bad colors, it's just how you use them, then softens up and admits that he's working on a project he calls "the reappearance of red." Digital capture, which he has switched to entirely, is up to that challenge, he avers. "I wish I hadn't stocked so much Kodachrome."
The wisecracking photographer gets off track, which is when he's at his best, and explains why he's never done celebrity portraiture. "I couldn't deal with their personalities," he says. "I'd probably end up telling the guy to fuck off."
"That's a shock," says one student flatly, no sarcastic tone needed.
Getting things back on track, another student asks Maisel if he ever intensifies his color with a polarizing filter. "I used a polarizing filter once, on a red car," he says, claiming that he hates anything technical. "The car looked insanely better, but the picture SAID polarizing filter. A polarizer becomes a crutch."
"Was that a good question?" asks the student. And the repartee continues.
Jay Maisel is teaching in the quaint Maine coastal town of Rockport for the first time in many years. He is part of a new creative energy weaving through the Maine Media Workshops' crazy-quilt campus, an energy fueled by big changes at what was America's first large-scale photo workshop, founded in 1973 by photographer David Lyman. Formerly, and famously, known as the Maine Photographic Workshops, the institution had become both insolvent and staid in recent years, falling a bit behind the learning curve of the technological changes transforming photography.
The program's revised name reflects an important and timely expansion of its curriculum, which has long featured both photography and film, into the multimedia world. Download its new catalog at TheWorkshops.com and you'll find the unlikely "Web TV," a class where you can take your YouTube videos to the next level. (Who knew there was a next level of YouTube?)
Which is not to say that the Maine Media Workshops has abandoned the photographic ethos and discipline that brought it into being. Sniff the wafts of fixer as you stroll past its Haas darkrooms (named for the influential colorist), where up to two dozen people dodge and burn under the tutelage of experts such as legendary printmaker George Tice and RIT's Willie Osterman (who made late prints for Ansel Adams), and visions of middle gray dance in your head. Educated noses may even detect a whiff of nonsilver processes. Walk ten minutes to Union Hall, once Rockport's town hall, and the exposed rafters, bare brick, cluttered studios, and informal exhibition space -- a far hue from the white on white of Manhattan galleries -- remind you that being a photographer still takes more than skill with a mouse.
Even so, back on the main campus classrooms hum with the sound of fan-cooled Macintosh G5 computers and pens tapping at Wacom tablets. Here dozens of workstations are networked to an on-campus service bureau equipped with various digital printers that spew forth hundreds of large and small prints each day. In other classrooms critiques are underway, now as often a matter of viewing digital projections of someone's "contact sheets" (neatly arranged by Apple Aperture or Adobe Photoshop Lightroom) as it is the old-fashioned practice of studying prints pinned to a wall of Homasote.
The Maine Media Workshops is, in fact, a kind of meeting ground for photography's rich past and digital promise. Its teachers and students seem to be searching for ways not only to make new imaging technology serve traditional photographic techniques but also to apply photography's artistic traditions to pictures made with that technology. "Digital technologies have created relationships between media forms that never existed before," says the school's new executive director, Charles Altschul. "The boundaries between those forms have broken down, and we think photographers need to broaden their multimedia knowledge to continue as effective artists, teachers, and businesspeople."
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