Energized and Inspired

I am not sure where to start so if this seems disjointed, forgive me. This past week was an amazing week. It started on Saturday, February 13th, in Houston when I met up with the Shootapaloozas , a most talented group of women, well, there a few men, but we are definitely all photographers. The image you see above is one of the wall installations we did in the 3600 block of Main Street in Houston for Fotofest. I wrote about this project here. I can't begin to tell you how much fun we had doing the installation. It will be a stop on one of the bus tours for Fotofest. I'm really proud to add this to my resume.

On Sunday we headed to Galveston for a week. I'm calling this week a retreat, a creative retreat. We all chipped in for the meeting room and materials and we played with making cyanotype kites, lanterns, artist books, marbled paper, little and huge cyanotype prints on paper and cloth and we made fish prints. We did mind mapping. We learned more about the health benefits of a plant based diet and our nutritionist-photographer made lunch for us everyday. But for me, the best thing that happened was Show and Tell. Each day some of us would present and talk about our work. The work came from a very deep and personal place and there was so much diversity: lumen prints, albumen prints, digital prints, manipulated prints, collages, cyanotypes, 3-D installations and I've probably forgotten some process.

The plan was that we would meet from 9 to about 6 but after the second day we decided to meet at 8 so we would have more time. Actually from the time we saw each other at breakfast until we broke up after dinner we were talking about photography, our projects and the difficulty of making work that means something to us.

Now, I am back home in San Miguel and trying to sort out what this week means for me during this next year. I'm energized, inspired and oh, so thankful for this creative community of photographers.