Working Copy: Developing a Photographer's Writing Practice with Erik Mace
Working Copy: Developing a Photographer's Writing Practice with Erik Mace
October 19th, 2026 - November 23rd, 2026
Mondays 6-7:30pm EDT for 6 weeks.
Much of our writing about our work happens after the fact — description, analysis, captions, all trying to catch up to an image or a project. Let's approach writing differently, together. Let's treat language as another material in the same practice — something we work with consistently, not reach for on occasion.
Each session we'll bring in pieces in progress — essays, statements, fragments, anything where words are doing some of the same work your images do — and see what happens when we put them in front of each other.
A working copy, by definition, isn't done yet. This group is for photographers who want writing to become a consistent, ongoing part of their practice, people who suspect language might be able to do something their camera can't, and who want to find out what.
Kinship uses a pay-what-you-can honor system with a minimum donation of $60. The actual cost for a 5-6 week practice group is $125. Donations below $125 are being subsidized by Kinship. Please give as generously as you can. If you cannot afford the minimum donation of $60 please request a scholarship.
Erik Mace is a visual artist who uses photography, design, and book arts to activate questions about how we see, interpret, and construct reality. Process is central to his work — he subjects photographic material to iterative acts of disruption, introducing error and ambiguity as productive forces. When images stop acting as evidence, his practice begins.
In 2024, Erik was named Photography Artist in Residence at The Bascom: A Center for the Visual Arts. His solo exhibition Fragmented Reality broke down digital photographs to binary code, transformed the data, and rendered new images asking what happens to perception with no access to a source of truth.
Erik received his BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and studied at the ICP in New York. He is a founding member of the Mall R.A.T.S. collective and has led workshops with the Kinship Photography Collective. His work has been published in Southern Cultures, Lenscratch, and Murze Magazine, and shown in New York, Berlin, North Carolina, and Georgia. His studio is based in Asheville, NC.
