Lessons Framed

Ira Block’s photography has taken him all over the world, from the High Arctic to China’s Gobi Desert. But once a summer, he travels to Rockport, Maine, to share the skills and techniques behind the visual essays he develops for National Geographic and other famous magazines. 

For one intense week, he works with a small group of aspiring photojournalists— usually no more than a dozen—who come to the Maine Media Workshops for what Education Director Elizabeth Greenberg calls “a completely immersive experience.”

Block is just one of many accomplished photographers and film artists who make up the revolving faculty of the Maine Media Workshops, the recently minted name for the umbrella organization formerly known as the Maine Photographic Workshops, the International Film and Television Workshops, and Rockport College. Changes in name and ownership aside, one thing has remained the same throughout the school’s 36-year history. “When you’re there, you feed off everybody else’s enthusiasm,” says Block, who lives in New York City. “You’re able to establish rapport with other people fairly quickly. There’s great camaraderie.”

In the busy season between May and October, as many as 20 different workshops may be taking place at the same time, on and around the small campus near Rockport’s much-photographed harbor. Subject matter includes portrait photography, film editing, sound production, lighting, special effects, directing television commercials, book design—anything to do with the arts of film and photography. All are taught by masters in their field. The chance to rub shoulders with professionals and ambitious peers in an informal setting draws students from all over the world.

“There’s something about eating outside at a picnic table under a tent in Maine that does away with competition and egos,” says Executive Director Charles Altschul. “It’s typical to see a world-famous photographer having a conversation with a high school kid. Of the 350 people on campus at any one time, every one of them has a real interest in film and photography. You can’t have a conversation that isn’t of interest to the person across the table from you. For a week, you’re in this intense environment with people of like mind. Where else does that happen in your life?”

It’s been happening in Rockport since David Lyman founded the Workshops in 1973. A photographer, world traveler, and blue-water sailor, Lyman was looking for a harbor for his boat and a place to test his ideas of motivational, hands-on learning. What started out as a photography workshop in the basement of Union Hall, the waterfront brick building that was built in 1852 as Rockport’s town hall, has grown into a unique educational center with a worldwide reputation. Eleven percent of Workshops participants come from other countries.

“In a funny way, we’re almost known better internationally than we are locally,” Altschul says. “We hear stories all the time of people with connectons to the Workshops crossing paths somewhere halfway around the world.”

Irene Abdou could easily be one of them. The Maryland-based photographer was a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa in the mid-1990s and now conducts research for a nonprofit corporation involved in malaria prevention in South Sudan. “My passion is travel photography,” she says. “I’d say I’m semiprofessional. I dream of one day doing something for National Geographic.”

To get one step closer to that dream, she enrolled in Block’s one-week course, “The National Geographic Photographer in the Digital Age,” in the summer of 2007. “I’d never taken a photography class in my life,” she says. “I was looking for affirmation as much as anything else. I didn’t have a lot of confidence. But I found out that I was going in the right direction.”

Block has photographed features on dinosaurs, Japan’s Samurai tradition, and the preservation of Incan mummies, among other subjects. He’s been to the North Pole, and early in his career he photographed Joe Namath for Sports Illustrated. “My workshop is mostly about storytelling and how to produce a photo essay,” he says. “I talk about things like doing the research, getting permissions, and moving a story forward visually.”

A National Geographic story can take years to research, photograph, and produce. Abdou and her classmates had one week to produce a completed essay consisting of five photographs.

“He showed how to tell a story in as few pictures as possible,” says Tom Haydu of New Jersey, another of Block’s students. “By the time a story gets to a magazine, you may have only three or four pictures.”

Abdou found her subject on her way to the Workshops, when she stopped in Warren to take a picture of a junked car that had turned into an outdoor art project. The car belonged to a local sculptor, with whom she struck up a conversation. “I had no idea going up there what my story would be,” she says. “I don’t think any of us did.”

Though Block’s course is for more advanced students (“He assumes you have a certain technical level when you get there,” Haydu says), most are aspiring photographers who do something else for a living. They come away from Block’s class with a better idea of the organizational, planning, and research process that goes into a story before a single picture is snapped.

The sculptor at the center of Abdou’s project creates large metal pieces of art that are typically displayed outdoors. She decided to focus on the sculptures themselves and the local clients who bought them. Her schedule was loose but busy. After breakfast, she would head out to take photographs, and then meet with Block in the afternoon to go over her work. “His role was looking at what people brought back, and maybe pointing out what was missing,” she says. “He was there making sure people were on the right track.”

“We provide an opportunity for people to get away from the demands of everyday life and join a passionate community committed to learning new skills and creating new work,” Greenberg says. “Students learn by doing.”

In the summer, it’s not uncommon to see gatherings of camera crews, actors, directors, and assistants at various places around the waterfront or along Rockport’s small side streets, perhaps using one of the Workshops vans to film a tracking shot of someone riding behind on a bicycle. Actors from nearby community theater groups like the Belfast Maskers are frequently recruited to star in student films.

Tom Haydu is among the satisfied customers who have attended the Workshops more than once. Several summers ago, he took a weeklong class in portrait photography with Joyce Tenneson, whose work has appeared on the covers of Time, Life, Esquire, and other well-known publications. “There were 18 of us in the class,” he says. “We typically worked in groups of three. The school hired professional models for us to photograph. One person would do the lighting, another would work the model setting up poses, and the third would shoot photos. Then we’d switch. By the end of the week, we’d developed these great working relationships. In fact, a lot of us have kept in touch since then.”

Students, faculty, and staff all speak of the special atmosphere that pervades the place and defies easy definition. “One of the things I enjoyed the most was the time we had together after-hours,” Abdou says. Lectures and presentations in the theater at Union Hall are well-attended by both Workshops participants and the general public. Nearby Camden provides adequate nightlife and venues for extended discussions of all things related to the visual arts.

Each week culminates on Friday night with a lobster dinner underneath the communal mess tent, followed by a showing of student work in the sound stage, put together in one day by the Workshops’ audiovisual postproduction staff. It’s a mélange of still photography, film, animation, and mixed media. Everyone attends. “Thanks to the new technology we have, it’s a completely integrated production,” Greenberg says. “It’s a sampling of the work of every student in every class that week. It’s a celebration. You can feel the exhilaration in the room.”

The reputation of the Workshops has attracted the sponsorship of many of the world’s leading technology manufacturers and service providers. Their donations of equipment ensure that students have hands-on access to the very best tools available. “Last year, Canon became our major sponsor,” Altschul says. “They came to the school, and talked to us about what kind of equipment we’d like to have. We told them that we would really like to move over the next several years to become completely high-def, because that’s where the industry is going. They came back with a letter saying that they didn’t want to do it over a period of years; they wanted to do it now.” Soon after that, a crate arrived with 20 high-definition cameras and about $300,000 worth of equipment.

Companies like Canon, Altschul explains, see the Workshops as fertile ground for marketing new products. Hands-on experience with cutting-edge equipment leads to purchases in the future when photographers, filmmakers, and multimedia artists move on from their Workshops experience into their professional lives. Other sponsors include Kodak, Panasonic, Adobe, Epson, and Olympus.

“They see us as a school that has a high level of expertise, and also teaches multimedia, which they see as their future,” he says. “It’s kind of a brave new world, and we’re ideally positioned to take advantage of it.”
But getting to that position hasn’t always been easy. Three years ago, the Workshops teetered on the brink of financial collapse. Altschul was part of a group of concerned local citizens that formed a nonprofit organization for the purpose of purchasing the school’s intellectual property from Lyman.

At the same time, the physical property—the small campus a short walk from the harbor—was sold to a subsidiary of the Leucadia National Corporation, which then leased the property back to the Workshops. The school has recently been able to clear its debt and repurchase most of its former buildings, in what Altschul describes as a low-profile arrangement with Leucadia “to ensure a future for the school.”

“They’ve been extremely supportive,” he says. “They’ve always made it clear that they want us to succeed. It’s a wonderful relationship between a public and private entity that could really be a model for the way things work in the future.”

Leucadia still owns the historic Union Hall, which it plans to renovate and continue using in association with the Workshops. The diversified holding company, based in New York City, owns 120 acres near Rockport and 76 acres on Islesboro, and, according to Altschul, is interested in pursuing “green” development in Maine and elsewhere.

Charles Altschul’s association with the Workshops began while he was teaching at Yale in the 1980s and also working with Kodak, at that time a major sponsor of the school. “David Lyman had a congress in Rockport every year,” he recalls. “In 1990 the theme of the congress was computers and photography. There was a demonstration of the software that would become Photoshop. Some of the photographers saw this demonstration, and as you can imagine, their jaws dropped. This was the future, the new era.”

When Kodak opened its Center for Creative Imaging in nearby Camden, Altschul was invited to the opening, and in 1991 he became the center’s director of education and made the move to Maine. He’s been, as he puts it, “keeping an eye on what’s going on” at the Workshops ever since—including teaching a workshop or two. Along with other professionals in the area, including photographer and Island Institute cofounder Peter Ralston, he helped formed the group that worked to keep the school afloat through the transition to nonprofit status. He was named director of the Workshops in 2007.

One of the first decisions of the new board of directors was to coordinate everything under the Maine Media label. Previously, Greenberg says, people “didn’t necessarily get the sense that we’re all one place.” The International Film and Television Workshops and Maine Photographic Workshops merged to become Maine Media Workshops, and Rockport College, another arm of the program, was renamed Maine Media College.

“I like to say that the best of what we do best got better,” says Greenberg, who has been employed at the Workshops in various capacities for the past 19 years. “To see the school thriving, and the stability of the past two years, has been truly remarkable.”

Lyman remains involved, most notably in the Destinations program, which this year will take photographers to northern California, Paris, Tunisia, Istanbul, Iceland, Prague, Budapest, and Tuscany. He also teaches a one-week workshop in Rockport in June on developing one’s creative potential.

But despite its international reputation, cutting-edge equipment, and the accomplishments of its faculty, Altschul says the Workshops programs are open to anyone, local or otherwise, at all levels of experience.

“There’s this perception that we’re working exclusively at the very high end,” he says. “People see these vans around town with our logos, and the trailers, and they assume that it’s this high-end facility that they don’t have any means to connect to. But in point of fact, our most popular course is Introduction to Digital Photography. It’s designed for someone who’s just purchased a digital camera, and realizes that there’s a lot more to it than just pointing and shooting.”

Maine residents are also able to take advantage of low standby rates, when an opening occurs in a class because of a cancellation. “We think of it as our Maine resident incentive,” he says. “If you’re able to come at the last minute because there’s an empty seat, we offer it at a substantial discount.”

And despite the modern equipment, traditional and antique methods of photography remain an important part of the Workshops’ mission. At a time when many photography schools are getting rid of their chemical darkrooms, the Workshops offers courses in platinum printing, ambrotypes (glass plates), and tintypes, using processes developed more than a century ago.

In addition to his administrative duties, Altschul teaches a September workshop in design and book arts, and a November workshop in letterpress printing. “My favorite workshops are those that cross over between the old and the new,” he says. “For instance, we have a teacher who teaches inkjet over platinum. We will actually set up a computer and printer in the darkroom, and the students will make platinum prints and then run them through the inkjet printer.”

While attending such workshops may sound like fun, investing the time and money to come study in Rockport, Maine, is often meant to be a career stepping-stone. Greenberg mentions former students who have won awards for photography or showcased films at Sundance and other festivals. Irene Abdou recently opened her first solo photography exhibit, Africa Dreamed, at the Delaplaine Visual Arts Education Center in Frederick, Maryland.

If students, faculty, and staff are passionate about the time they’ve spent at the Workshops, it’s because passion remains an integral part of the process that David Lyman envisioned 36 years ago. “As technology improves, Rockport’s not as remote as it used to be,” Greenberg says. “But it’s still not an easy place to get to. You have to mean it. You have to make a commitment.”