This workshop will be a blockbuster. Bruce Barnbaum leads a fabulous excursion into the city of Cusco, Peru (altitude: over 10,000 feet), and to the incredible Inca citadel of Machu Picchu. The focus of the workshop will be creative seeing and thinking about an area that is remote, yet frequently visited and photographed. This dualism presents unique challenges and opportunities to photographers with a zest for travel and a further zest for creating meaningful visual statements and surprises.
Bruce’s photography expands upon the dynamics he finds in both nature and the works of man, relating forces to the sweeping forms that dominate his vivid imagery. Visually he emphasizes the best of humanity and nature, sometimes with bold realism, often with degrees of abstraction to heighten the mystery. He understands light to an extent rarely found, and combines this understanding with a mastery of composition, applying them to an extraordinarily wide range of subject matter. His photographs often contain ambiguities concerning either the size of the scene photographed and/or its orientation, forcing the viewer to pause and think, and to become part of the creative process. These qualities lend themselves well to a land and atmosphere first popularized by famed Peruvian indigenous photographer, Martin Chambi, whose large-format B&W imagery first captured the public’s fascination in 1932 with a series on Machu Picchu for National Geographic.
