Dave Nitsche Conceptual | Fine Art Photography
January 7th, 2008,I discovered the truly breathing-taking work of Dave Nitsche through the course he is offering at The Picture Perfect School of Photography, which is titled Conceptual Photography.
The course Dave is offering is precisely the sort of subject matter which I feel does not get taught in traditional art colleges. While most courses focus on “nuts and bolts,” there is a dearth of much-needed courses on what I think of as “hammers and wrenches.” I taught myself many of the fundamentals of picture-taking long before I started actively pursuing a career and education in photography, and have always been surprised at how little attention is given to image designing in these curricula.
While it’s always been troubling to me that so few art schools focus on the business of being an artist, I understand the dynamics which cause that lack. Less comprehensible to me, with my background in technical theater, why art schools never focus on the design and pre-design stages of art making. When I made this argument to a friend of mine, he pointed out a series of DVDs by Ian McCaig, published by Gnomon Workshop. The four discs in the Visual Storytelling series are truly amazing, and incredibly useful teach-by-example lectures which focus entirely on how to flesh out stories in your head, and can easily be generalized to almost any visual field.