CITY LAB
Feb 19 – April 23, 2018 (6:00PM – 9:00 PM)
10 sessions: Mondays
Instructor: Joseph Michael Lopez
City Lab is an experiential class that invites participants to develop and refine their visual composition skills, expands their sense of light, and improves their photographic practice over a long course of study. Participants will develop a heightened sensitivity to their surroundings while photographing in a specific neighborhood within New York’s five boroughs. They will commit to an intentional focus for their projects such as the documentation of a social activity within a chosen neighborhood or the continuation of an ongoing New York-based personal project. Discussions cover research, building confidence and trust, intention, feelings, illumination, camera operation, compositional tools, aesthetics, collaboration, improvisation, and effective workflow and editing.
Joseph Michael Lopez was born in New York City in 1973 to a mother who escaped the Cuban revolution in 1967. He began his career as an analog cinematographer on the critically acclaimed Bruce Weber film, Chop Suey (2001), and was an autodidact until 2009, when he approached Columbia University without an undergraduate degree and was accepted as a MFA candidate based on the merit of his documentary portfolio. He completed his MFA in 2011. Currently, Joseph divides his time between long-form projects, teaching, and commercial work. His photographs have appeared on the cover of M, The Magazine for Leica M Photography, Leica Fotografie International, The Sunday Review of The New York Times, New York magazine and The New Yorker, among others. Joseph’s photographs of Cuba work were recently on exhibit in Cuban Photography after 1980: Selections from the Museum’s Collection, at The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. In 2016, a commissioned series of his photographs of New York neighborhoods, titled New York at Its Core: Future City Lab, was permanently installed at The Museum of the City of New York. Images from Dear New Yorker, the series from which this commission originated, have also been published in Bystander: A History of Street Photography, by Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz, and 100 Great Street Photographs, by David Gibson.
josephmlopez.com
Any changes to the program will be announced online.
36 E. 30th St. New York, NY, 10016 (between Madison Ave. & Park Ave. South
(917) 288-0343 | info@penumbrafoundation.org | penumbrafoundation.org