Seeing Becomes Love

Seeing Becomes Love with Susan Patrice

Daytime Group: September 16th - October 21st
Wednesday 10:30 am - 12:00 pm ET
6 weekly Zoom sessions

Evening Group: September 17th - October 22nd
Thursday 7 - 8:30 pm ET
6 weekly Zoom sessions

Group size: 6

Now more than ever, we need new ways to fall in love with the world. Photography offers us a path. Through the quality of our attention, we can rekindle our relationship with the wider world.

Love — the animating, connecting force, the pull toward aliveness itself — is creativity's essential companion. Here, the encounter with something outside ourselves moves us to photograph. When we reach toward a subject, or our eyes follow our hearts, this is already love at work. Creativity turns longing into connection. For many of us, creativity is already one of our primary relationships. Let's celebrate that.

For this six-week practice, we will reinterpret relationship literature on romantic love and redirect it towards our creative encounters. We have lots of material to play with — whole libraries of wisdom have been written to help us navigate what it means to truly see and be seen by another. Each week we will create prompts that invite us to court our subjects — a forest, a stranger, a stretch of light, our creative practice itself — with the same desire, patience, and curiosity we'd bring to any relationship of substance. Here, the question isn't whether photography can hold this kind of love. It's whether we've been letting it.

Together, we'll practice setting love loose on the whole world, so that it stops being scarce and becomes something we can access everywhere, all the time. This is how seeing and photography become an act of love. 

No prior photography experience needed; smartphone photography is welcome.

If you are interested in this practice group and cannot attend Monday evenings, we are open to adding a midday group. If interested, please email info@kinship.photography.

Kinship uses a pay-what-you-can honor system. This six-session practice group requires a minimum donation of $60. The average contribution for a six-session practice group is $125. Please give as generously as you can. If you cannot afford the minimum contribution of $60, please request a scholarship.

Susan Patrice is a documentary photographer, contemplative artist, and community arts organizer. Over the last twenty years, she has worked with hundreds of creatives, drawing on a vast and diverse collection of resources gathered from her love of interdisciplinary studies. She lives in Cumberland, MD, where she is the director of Kinship Studio, a photography residency and retreat center.

Since 2016, Susan’s photographic work has explored the power of visual perception and its impact on feelings of connection and kinship. Through the use of handmade cameras built in response to the places she photographs, she engages in visual and gestural conversations with the land.