Please join us in welcoming Palmer Davis, the host of our first ever free photography inspiration workshop in honor of Mental Health Month. He will be providing four prompts over the next two months that will hopefully inspire you to create through even your most challenging moments. Palmer is a faculty member at the International Center of Photography, the world’s leading institution dedicated to photography and visual culture, located in New York City. Palmer’s photographic eye was honed over a twenty five-year career as a Madison Avenue advertising creative director. His first photography class at age sixteen was a transformative experience that started him on a lifelong artistic journey. He studied photography at Hampshire College and the International Center of Photography, where he is now a member of the faculty. Widely exhibited and collected, Palmer is a fine art photographer and teacher who is represented in New York by ClampArt.

Palmer makes pictures that explore the mysterious and the magical in the everyday. His photographs evoke a sense of place and a moment in time. They tell stories and reveal metaphors. Whether the image is an expansive panorama or an intimate glimpse, it is always a personal interpretation viewed through a prism of wonder, dream, memory myth or desire.

Assignment 1: “In our increasingly fragmented world, with so many demands on our time and constraints on our lives, the theme of ‘Freedom’ seems particularly potent. For the singer Janis Joplin, back in the 1960’s, freedom was ‘just another word for nothing left to lose.’ What does freedom mean to you today? What does it look like? What does it feel like?

Your photo assignment is to visually capture the idea of freedom from whatever aspect you choose, from the personal to the political, the emotional to the physical. Consider how ‘freedom’ relates to notions of identity, community and culture. Choose the meaning of freedom that speaks most personally to you and visually express that in one to three photographs.” 

Want to participate? Send in your photos by May 10th to get valuable feedback from the workshop leader, inclusion in a special upcoming social media gallery, as well as a possible feature on the BLC gallery site: BrokenLightCollective@gmail.com