Personal Ad Essay from Look3 Workshops /w David Alan Harvey

Thursday marked the end of the Look3 Workshops and the beginning of the Festival of the Photograph. The workshops ended with our work from the week being the opening for the festival. A pretty neat ordeal to have a packed audience see your images projected in such a stunning venue.

I shot two essays for the week with both being completely different. For the first couple days of the workshop I didn’t shoot much at all except for a few random singles.

Like all creative endeavors it took me awhile to figure out exactly what I wanted to say. It’s great seeing what can happen to one’s mind when you have the pressure of a workshop deadline looming. In many ways it was like my time in grad school – you drain yourself of all creative energy and in your cloudy desperation to generate a powerful, yet simple idea a project finds you and away you go. I believe strongly in the notion that some projects/subjects find you rather than you finding them.

The project combines my two biggest reasons why I love photography; encouraging my child’s curiosity and my love for meeting new people. I can’t thank the awesome subjects here in Charlottesville enough who weren’t creeped out by some stranger coming to their house to photograph them. They helped in making my week a memorable one.

The personal ad essay seemed to be a hit with everyone here and a concept I like a lot. It’s pretty neat to have people like Eugene Richards telling you he loved the series or Harvey telling you he’s going to steal the idea if you don’t continue to work on it. It’s anything but hard-hitting and a nice fit for the type of photography I’m enjoying more and more; a fun and light-hearted topic. It’ll also serve as a nice break from the multimedia project Jenn and I will be working on together this summer that is a much more serious topic.

For the rest of the project I’m only going to seek people out from newspaper personals as the craigslist listings just don’t have the same charm and quaint descriptions that only newsprint provides

Here’s a look at a few of the people behind the personal ads:

This Craigslist ad just doesn’t have the same appeal.