1. Structure

You and I "meet" at regular intervals by Instant Messenger. By the time of each meeting, I will have received (by Internet or regular mail) your pictures for that session.

You and I discuss your work. Assignments and exercises are given, including reading assignments, and pictures and artists to look at.

Every two months you will submit a portfolio of new work. This will give us both periodic overviews of your development, enable us to spot new themes, stylistic directions, etc. as they emerge, and decide upon the emphases of the next two months' work

When your pictures are numerous and coherent enough to be called a "body of work," and to express your specific promise, we shall begin to discuss when, how, and where to begin to make you, the emerging artist, known to others in the public and professional milieux of photography and art.

Also, if your work indicates that the best thing for you would be to enroll in formal university study, the discussion will turn to questions of which program would be best, how to create a strong application, and so on.

2. The Advantages of This Method

Teaching and learning can progress at your own rate. You will neither be held back by others students nor impede their progress.

You set the priorities of subject matter, style, technique, materials, etc., and work accordingly.

My teaching is specific to your priorities and needs as I perceive them. At any given point in the tutorial process, assignments, exercises, the study of other pictures, readings in the criticism and history of photography and pictures generally, and in related fields, are specific to your knowledge and to the immediate problems and apparent direction of your work.

I gain a thorough, detailed knowledge of your way of learning and customize my teaching to it. You do not need to extrapolate information for yourself from my comments on other students' work.

Attention is concentrated on the you and your work rather than dispersed across many students and their pictures. Your time, then, is used most efficiently, and for the time period of each tutorial session, you contemplate only your own work. Thus learning and photographing are coherent: your transition between talking about your pictures and making them is fluid.

The chief pre-requisites for this course are passion for your work and a commitment both to sustaining the effort over time and for working and submitting work faithfully at the established intervals. 

Given the flexibility and individual attention of the tutorial method, anyone, of any age, working or desiring to work in any style, with any camera or materials, is eligible, from the neophyte who has not bought his/her first camera yet but is only desiring to begin, to the technically proficient photographer of many years who is burning to make better art, either only for him/herself or to make it known to others.

A well-known fact from the Hungarian photographer Andre Kertesz' childhood can best illustrate this point.

The inspiration and desire to become a photographer came to Kertesz in 1901, when he was seven years old and saw woodcut illustrations of everyday life in late-nineteenth-century Hungarian family magazines. "I want to do something similar," he told himself, "only with a camera." But his family was poor, he could not afford a camera until he was eighteen and working at his first job, as a bookkeeper in a Budapest stock brokerage. So for eleven years he practiced "taking" pictures. Whenever he would see something interesting, something he thought would make a good picture, he would quickly form a rectangle with the thumb and forefingers of both hands, bring this "frame" quickly to his eye, and nod his head and make a clicking sound with his tongue to indicate the action and sound of making the exposure.

A similar seven-year old of today, with the least expensive camera on the market, is eligible for this tutorial. This has been demonstrated by the work of contemporary photographer, teacher, and MacArthur Grant recipient Wendy Ewald, who, with inexpensive cameras and rudimentary darkroom equipment, has taught children in rural Appalachia, Colombia and India, and in South African townships, how to make strong, expressive and often beautiful photographs. They can be seen in Ewald's books Portraits and Dreams, Magic Eyes, and I Dreamed I Had A Girl In My Pocket.   

Further demonstration of this is shown in the work of photographer Sean Reid, Ewald's protege in the late nineteen-eighties, who, under a grant from the Irish Arts Council,  taught children in the West of Ireland to make eloquent photographs of each other and of their daily lives.   Once again, the cameras and darkroom equipment used were simple and inexpensive.  These pictures toured Ireland and the U.K. in 1989 as the exhibit Griangraf Na Paisti and are now in the collection of the Irish Arts Council.

If you are accepted as a student, the tutorial cost is $75.00 per hour for picture review and Instant Messenger discussions.  Together we will determine the frequency and times for our meetings based on the needs of the work, our schedules and other factors.  Further details of payment methods and other policies will be sent to you via e-mail after the portfolio review which is described below.

Send me a portfolio of between 10-20 pictures, either as a URL link (see technical notes below) in an e-mail letter to benlifson@yahoo.com, or by regular mail or courier (with a money order in $US 25.00 for return postage if you wish them returned). Include a cover letter describing yourself: your age, current activities, how long you have been photographing, your immediate aims and long-term ambitions for your work. Please also give me a good idea of the photographers, painters, film makers and other visual artists whose work you are familiar with, including those whom you admire, who have influenced you, whose leads you are trying to follow, etc., and those whose work you know but are not interested in. Short but detailed comments as to why these artists and some of their specific works interest you will also help me. I should also like to know artists and works you are familiar with and/or inspired by in the fields of literature, theater, music, dance, and your interests in other disciplines such as history, the sciences, the social sciences, and so on. Finally, so that I might get a first idea of the structure best for you, please give me a good picture of your current work, study, and/or family obligations, the amount of time and how many days per week you could devote to your photography, whether you use film or digital cameras, if you have your own darkroom, how fast or slow your computer/Photoshop hardware/software is, the kinds of subjects that you can photograph and the approximate number of pictures you can produce per week without neglecting your other responsibilities, and so on. 

I will review your portfolio and cover letter as soon as I receive them. This review will ask the following main questions:

1. Do your portfolio and cover letter indicate that your interest in and ambitions for your work are appropriate to the course? 

2. Will the subject matter you are currently interested in make it possible for you to photograph either every day or enough days per week to enable you to make progress?

3. If not, do your portfolio and cover letter suggest assignments and exercises, unrelated to your current subject matter, and that you could work on almost every day in order to make it possible for you to take the course and for the course to enhance your progress?

4. Does it look as though you can photograph and generate pictures at a rate that would make our discussions fruitful and thus justify the time and money you put into it? 

If the answers are, cumulatively,"Yes," and if there is a place, tutorial sessions will begin almost immediately. 

If there is no place, and should you so wish, I will put you on a waiting list and tell you how many names are on it and how soon there might be an opening. 

If you do not seem either ready for the course, or if your current life situation doesn't seem to give you enough time to pursue it, I will suggest ways in which you might better prepare yourself to apply later.