My workshops have a new, and delightful, location in rural France, a house set within fifteen acres of oak woodland in the Quercy Blanc, a few kilometres from the medieval hill town of Lauzerte.
It feels like the right place for the kind of photography I have always wanted to teach.
Not photography as a collection of techniques, effects or equipment, but as a way of paying attention. Looking carefully. Moving slowly. Understanding why one photograph can matter. Learning to edit, question, return, and gradually develop a visual position of your own.
The house and woodland give us something increasingly rare: time and space.
We can photograph in the morning, work through images in the afternoon, put prints on the wall, argue about them over dinner, look at books, walk through the woods, return to a place when the light changes, and discover what happens when a workshop is allowed to become part of life rather than something confined to a classroom timetable.
The landscape here is quietly extraordinary. Oak woods, limestone, orchards, fields, old farm buildings, tracks and villages shaped by centuries of occupation. Nearby, Lauzerte sits above the surrounding valleys, a medieval bastide on the Santiago de Compostela route, its streets and houses carrying the accumulated evidence of commerce, pilgrimage, conflict, craft and ordinary life.
There is beauty here, but it is not scenery waiting obediently to be photographed. You have to look, be immersed, enquire, discover, engage.
That is important.
At a time when images have become almost effortless to produce, I am increasingly interested in everything that remains difficult: attention, judgement, curiosity, patience, knowledge, instinct and the ability to recognise significance in seemingly ordinary things.
Those are the things a camera cannot do for us.
The new workshop is intended as a place for serious photography without solemnity; for making pictures, discussing them, eating well, walking, thinking, disagreeing, looking again and enjoying the company of people who remain curious about the world.
A house among the oaks, near a village built on a hill of pale stone. A perfect place to pause and make photographs.
.
