Photo Storytelling Workshop: Photography as Dialogue

“A photograph is a product of an encounter and the start of a conversation” (Palmer 2017: ‘Photography and Collaboration’)

Following the success of our last round of photo storytelling workshop in June, instructor Dustin Shum returns this August to facilitate another online workshop, with priority for members of civil societies and researchers and students interested in exploring images from open archives and to supplement their research publications, or to enhance their websites and communications with visual storytelling. 

If we understand photography as a catalyst for conversation, each photograph can be considered as an unfinished process. Its values and meanings are constantly extended and reinvented through understanding, interpretation and application.

Titled “Photo Storytelling Workshop: Photography as Dialogue”, the upcoming workshop that spans three weekends invites participants to engage in a dialogue with oneself and other participants through images from the WMA Open archive. The workshop will discuss social, cultural, political and economic issues underpinning archived images, and investigate alternative social imaginations via new associations of their selected images. 

The workshop will be conducted online in Cantonese. But please do write to us at [email protected]  to request this workshop in English, we would like to set one up if there is a demand for it.

Details of the workshop as follows:

Capacity: 10, with priority for members of civil societies and researchers and students

First Session:  15/08/2020, 2:30 – 5:30pm

• Introduction to image reading and appreciation. 
• Methods of interpreting, integrating and editing images.  
• Using digital image management tools to edit visual stories. 
• Participants will select 10-15 images from the WMA Open online archive to develop their photo stories after the first session. 

Second Session：22/08/2020, 2:30-5:30pm

• Introduction to narratives of visual stories. 
• Review and critique of participants’ edits of visual stories

 Third Session：29/08/2020, 2:30-5:30pm

• Finalisation of participants visual stories

For workshop sign up: please refer to the Chinese page.

About the instructor 

Dustin Shum is a Hong Kong based photographer and independent curator. He graduated from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 1994 with a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) Degree in Photographic Design. Shum has received awards for outstanding documentary photography by the Newspaper Society of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Press Photographers Association, the World Association of Newspapers and Publishers, and Amnesty International. His work is collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) and the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, and is widely exhibited internationally and locally. Shum has published several photobooks including Live Alone a Life: People with Mental Illness, Themeless Parks, Life and Times and BLOCKS. In 2013, Shum co-founded The Salt Yard, an independent, artist-run exhibition space dedicated to photography, where he curated a number of exhibitions by overseas and local photographers. 

Shum also often publishes articles on photography discourse under the pen name “Fotopiggie” or in his own name. For details, see: https://medium.com/@fotopiggie

Image/ Lam Hiu Man, 《搵食車》from WMA Open archive