Pop-Up Classes at RIT Photo
This year, the photojournalism faculty launched an exciting series of one credit weekend classes called mini-workshops or pop-up classes. The workshops were designed to bring new influences to the school and open up the curriculum to interdisciplinary approaches. It was our hopes that the workshops would add flexibility to our course offerings.
We invited award-winning writer, video editor, and producer Eric Maierson to lead a workshop in the fall. Eric was scheduled to teach a workshop exploring creativity November 15-17, 2019. Maierson has won two Emmys for his video documentary work and he has a been published in the New Yorker. He has produced educational content for MediaStorm and writes about creativity and other professional challenges on his blog and in News Photographer magazine. Maierson worked with RIT Photo faculty member Josh Meltzer to build the three-day intensive class which emphasized new tools and ideas designed to help students work through creative blocks and build stronger and clearer projects.
Maierson’s dynamic teaching style and playful classroom exercises created a space for experimentation and problem solving that is not always easy to create during a normal class schedule. Many of the students and faculty found new and sustainable ways to improve their workflow. Catie Rafferty, a senior who is working on her capstone project said, “I enjoyed the exercises we did to learn about limitations. One exercise had us thinking about only white things and then only white foods. We also had to come up with the worst names for colors and they were used to dispel all the bad ideas. Learning about how to use limitations in work has already helped me in some of my current work. I noticed Josh Meltzer used this technique in his multimedia class and it was really effective.”
Maierson also combined other exercises such as free writing and black out poetry to stimulate different approaches used for creating a narrative in which he mixed in examples of his own work. He even video conferenced with his colleague Tim McLaughlin who spoke about a challenging film he worked on with Zadie Smith and Deanna Lawson. It was an exciting and refreshing few days. We were so fortunate to have Eric visit RIT.
There are two upcoming mini-workshops scheduled in the spring that are open to all students and all year levels across the University. The Special Olympic Mini-Workshop PHPJ-352-02 will bring students together to cover the New York State Special Olympics games from February 21-22 in the Rochester area. Students will work on teams as photographers, videographers, editors and producers to share live work in print and on the web. Picture creation and editing will be a big part of the experience.
The Fake News Mini-Workshop PHPJ 352 – 01 (56054) is scheduled for the weekend of February 7-9. Students will learn how to evaluate stories from the news media and understand some of the psychological and technological conditions that create fake news. The course will be taught by Karen Cetinkaya, an RIT alumna and former photo editor from the New York Times.
About the Author
Meredith Davenport is an associate professor in the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences. She earned her MFA from Hunter College and her BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology. She has enoyed a distinguished career in documentary photography. Her photographs have appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times and on the cover of Newsweek magazine as well as in the highly acclaimed HBO documentary Child Soldiers. She was invited to do a fellowship at Yaddo. She has received a Pew Fellowship and a Puffin Foundation grant. Her book Theater of War was published by Intellect Press in the fall of 2014.