here and elsewhere, Shanghai Theatre Academy Class of 2012

When I was asked by the Shanghai Theatre Academy to do a workshop I knew I wanted to transform the classroom itself into a conceptual frame to explore and enact photography. I wanted to make visible the class as a generation, as a sensibility, as a group - both by teaching a history of photography and then performing photography in multiple ways.

Together, the class and I would trace a history of conceptual photography to large scale photography to contemporary photography presenting over 300 works of art, fashion, cinema, print and online works and then through instructions, staging, and re-enactment create new works. We would think of the image not as a file or information but as an object, the object-image, and consider, where all these images go, and how the context of their presentation defines them.

We would also consider photography as an encounter — an encounter with each other, with history, with art, with photography itself. Photography would be a stage — a frame — to see each other, to read its claims to memory, to history and the distance between the image as long ago and elsewhere and the here and now.

The workshop would work through strategies of imaging, from conceptual instructions that generate actions to staging or re-enacting photographs and throughout the entire event of the workshop be documented as reportage. In the workshop, all three strategies — conceptual instructions, staging and  documentation — would be happening at the same time.

In all of it, I hope we can simultaneously see a brilliant class of young Shanghai art students (2012) staging themselves, enacting instructions, documenting themselves all the while letting us see photography as a performance that not only creates recording, photographs but creates connections between people, time, space, and ideas.