Practice Groups
Practice groups are facilitated learning circles that invite curious image makers (of all levels) to take a deeper dive into our current call for engagement. Each practice group starts with a dynamic overarching idea or question that inspires thoughtful, creative inquiry. Less hierarchical than workshops, they draw on the ideas, wisdom, and lived experiences of everyone in the room. Practice groups emphasize practice over product and encourage participants to celebrate both the beautiful and messy parts of their process. We see practice groups are incubators for new work and ideas that encourage both facilitators and participants to stretch and grow in their creative practice.
Practice group participants will be invited to share their photographs and findings with the larger community on our website and in a practice group Circle Back.
Elementals
Elemental Earth: WINTER 2025/2026
March 9th - April 6th, 2026
Mondays 12 - 1:30 pm ET (5 Weeks)
During this practice group, we will engage in Slow Looking to learn how to talk about what we see and listen for what emerges when others notice something we did not. Slow Looking invites us to stay present with friction, irritation, and uncertainty, which are vital parts of any creative process.
February 2nd - March 9th, 2026
Mondays 6:30-8:30 pm EST (6-Weeks)
In this practice group, we will take objects, whether a beloved heirloom or a favorite tchotchke, for walks, exploring the way light, texture, and place influence our connections not just to the objects, but more fundamentally to ourselves. Are the spirits of our objects inviting us in or asking us to move on?
January 15 - February 19, 2026
Thursdays 6 - 8 pm EST (6 Weeks)
Drawing on disability and ecological studies, practice group participants will consider how deep rest can be a creative and transmutative force. Using self-portraiture, embodied photographic practices, and/or transforming currently existing work with intention and care, we will use our cameras to build relationships with the earthen bodies that surround us.
January 27th - March 3rd, 2026
Tuesdays 7 - 8:30 pm EST (6 Weeks)
In this practice group, participants will use the rock cycle and plate tectonics as inspiration for their practice. Melting and crystallizing, slow flow, erosion, sedimentation, and burial. Coming together, splitting apart, abrading. How do our internal processes and external experiences meet in our photographs?
February 3rd - March 3rd, 2026
Tuesdays 7 - 9 pm EST (5 weeks)
In this practice group, participants will explore how Earth can be perceived across different time scales and how we relate to the vast span of time that encompasses Earth's history. Do we - or should we - view life as linear or cyclical or something else entirely?
ELEMENTAL WATER: FALL 2025
October 21st to November 25th, 2025
Weekly invitations are posted on Kinship Circle each Thursday.
Through this Kinship Circle invitation, we will examine our favourite works of artists who have spoken for water, what success in this field could look like and how it has been achieved. As an asynchronous practice gathering, Jon will lead with examples and prompts and facilitate the conversation throughout the time between new activities.
October 6 - November 24, 2025
Mondays 6:30 - 8:30 pm EST (8 Weeks)
During this practice group, we will consider these guiding questions: In what ways does the flow of water around us and within us make us feel alive? In what ways might particular objects offer portals to elemental states of mind and being? In the process of exploring the idea of aliveness, we will consider how photography can help us make sense of the unexpected life-forces contained within seemingly inanimate things.
October 9 - November 13
Thursdays 6:00-8:00 pm EST (6 Weeks)
Together, we will explore water through self-portraiture and embodied photography practices, while asking questions intended to expand and shift our creative practice. We will explore water’s capacity to aid transformation and transition, to hold grief, and the relationship between our own bodies and the bodies of water we live with.
November 4– December 2, 2026
Tuesdays 7 – 9 pm EST for 5 weeks.
In this practice group, we will explore water as photographic subject matter both literally and metaphorically. Water is unique in that it exists in solid, liquid, and gaseous states. How does this fluidity manifest in natural and human-constructed environments, and how can it be applied to how we live our lives as artists?
ELEMENTAL FIRE: SUMMER 2025
July 1st - August 5th, 2025
Tuesdays, 7:00 - 8:30 (6 Weeks)
Over the course of this practice group, we will be building a metaphorical campfire and telling stories around it through photography. We will ask ourselves: what is the fuel for our fire? What lights the spark? Participants will find new ways to tell their own stories – reaching into their memories and capturing their perspectives in the moment. We’ll explore both single- and multiple-image approaches and play with incorporating text as interest warrants.
July 1 - August 19, 2025
Tuesdays 6:30 - 8:30 pm (8 weeks)
This practice group will explore our relationship to elemental fire as experienced in the things that surround us. Fire, as it exists within bodies, carries ancient energy. How is it that some objects literally change the energy in a room? In what ways might particular objects offer portals to elemental states of mind and being?
July 3 - July 31, 2025
Thursdays 6:00-8:00 pm (5 Weeks)
In this practice group, we will tend to our own embodied flames before turning our fiery vision outward to explore how this element encourages us to relate to others. We will explore care as a form of nurturing fire, attention as an illuminating force, and fire as an alchemical process of transformation.
April 22, 2025 - April 22, 2026
Tuesdays 6:30 - 8:30 PM (wth short breaks for the holidays)
The Elemental Year draws creative inspiration from land-based cultures—where time moves in rhythm with the Earth and travels in circles and cycles. During this practice group, we will utilize the power of embodied seasonal rituals, contemplative practices, and deep reflection to explore our fundamental relationship to our elemental kin.
ELEMENTAL AIR: SPRING 2025
April 20 - May 25th, 2025
Weekly invitations are posted on Kinship Circle.
For this online Kinship Circle invitation, we will focus on movement and exchange through the lens of self, setting, and time. In a series of prompts, participants will be invited to take a walk while noticing aspects of both their bodies and their environments. The prompts will come from the growing literature on Forest Bathing and Walking Art.
April 22, 2025 - April 22, 2026
Tuesdays 6:30 - 8:30 PM (wth short breaks for the holidays)
The Elemental Year draws creative inspiration from land-based cultures—where time moves in rhythm with the Earth and travels in circles and cycles. During this practice group, we will utilize the power of embodied seasonal rituals, contemplative practices, and deep reflection to explore our fundamental relationship to our elemental kin.
April 24 - May 22, 2025
Thursdays 12 - 2 PM EDT (5 Weeks)
With a focus on self-portraiture and embodied photography practices, we will begin by exploring the way we experience air in our bodies—what happens when we draw attention to the exchange between our bodies and air? Through conversation and experimentation, we will be invited to shift our lenses to the exchanges that occur through our shared experiences of air.
April 15 - May 20, 2025
Tuesdays from 12:30 pm - 2:30 EST (6 Weeks)
This practice group will explore our relationship to elemental air as experienced in the things that surround us. Air, as it exists between bodies, carries ancient energy. How is it that some objects literally change the energy in a room? In what ways might particular objects offer portals to elemental states of mind and being?
Between Bodies
September 26th & October 24th, 2024
Thursdays 7 pm - 9 pm EDT (2 Weeks)
Whether it be your own personal photo library, a family collection, or an institutional archive, there are certain practices that will make the organization, navigation, and preservation of your archive easier for yourself & others to use. Join us for this mini-workshop to learn how.
September 3 - 24, 2024
Tuesdays 7 pm - 9 pm (5 Weeks)
In this practice/workshop, we explore the feelings of place. Together we open up the lenses of our imagination, our emotional body, and our profound relationships with all the locations that hold and are held by us—and then you, the photographers, open up the lenses of your cameras to this powerful, often mysterious, and always intimate world.
September 10 - October 22, 2024
Tuesdays 6:30 - 8:30 pm ET ( 7 weeks)
This group will encourage participants to think about and beyond the physical boundaries of a subject that interests them. Each participant will come to this group with an item, creature or phenomenon as a focal point, and build your understanding of its (their) web of connections through questions, research and photographic practices.
September 25 - October 23, 2024
Wednesdays 12 - 1:30 pm ET (6 weeks)
Join poet Meghan Sterling to write ekphrastic poetry based on your own work. Each virtual session will be an hour and a half long and will start with a brief group exercise in ekphrasis, a discussion of craft and approaches, time for writing in response to an image of each participant’s choosing, and a block of time to share new writing in a judgment-free zone of curiosity and support.
September 9 - October 14, 2024
Mondays 6 pm - 8 pm ET (6 weeks)
How can we use the camera to deepen our relationship with our own bodies through curiosity and attention? Can we use the camera to help us make space for the complexities of being alive? This practice group will explore self-portraiture as a way to honor complicated bodies, sick bodies, aging bodies, healing bodies, grieving bodies, changing bodies, marginalized bodies, gender diverse bodies, and human bodies.
May 9th - June 13th, 2024
Thursday 5 - 8 pm EDT (6 weeks)
Human activity has impacted every corner of the globe, including remote areas where human beings aren’t physically present. Is it possible for contemporary photographers to tell visual stories about the natural world without referencing humanity; human history, activities, folklore, industry?
April 4th - May 9th 2024
Thursdays 6 pm - 8 pm ET (6 weeks)
How can we dissolve the concrete edges of what we consider individual bodies through photography? This practice group begins with us asking where the edges of our bodies, the edges of our relationships, and the edges of human and more-than-human, are seen and felt. Can a more relational perspective shift those edges, or even dissolve them? How does that change the way we photograph and engage with the bodies around us, the bodies that are us?
March 5th - April 9th, 2024
Tuesdays 6 - 7:30 pm ET (6 weeks)
This practice group will explore what’s between us and the realization of our ideas—designed for the stir-crazy artists who feel like we’re consistently approximating resolution. This group will use photography as a starting point for discovery, but all forms of expression will be encouraged, including writing, sound, and mixed media. Weekly prompts and exercises will be offered as ways to push against the limits of our medium and our own limitations.
January 25th - February 29th, 2024
Thursdays 7 - 9 pm ET (6-weeks)
Getting stuck in your head and spiraling about all the creative decisions one has to make in art can bring your practice to a standstill. This group is geared towards artists who would benefit from a little relief in the creative process–whether that be through collaboration or an injection of randomness.
January 24th - February 28th, 2024 a
Wednesdays from 12 - 1:30 pm EST (6-weeks)
Many of us yearn to deepen our intimacy and connection with the natural world, and contemplative photography offers us a path. By reimagining photography as a relational medium, we can explore the subtle and often profound exchanges that occur between our bodies and the earth’s body. When practiced well, photography becomes a powerful tool for inspiring curiosity, humility, and wonder. Here, photography blossoms as a language of gesture and reciprocity, opening the doorway to new ways of seeing, knowing, and caring.
January 23rd - February 27th, 2024
Tuesdays 6 - 8:00 pm EST(6-weeks)
Is there a visual language for loss and grief? Can photography capture what is already lost or prepare us for future losses? During this practice group, we will explore loss in its many forms, whether of a person or place, a way of feeling or being. During this lightly facilitated six-week group, we will practice paying attention and dwelling in our own experiences of loss—offering us time to build community and a shared understanding of the many ways grief and loss gets into our bones.
January 25th - February 22nd, 2024
Thursday from 7 - 8:30 pm (5 weeks))
Where do our bodies end and other bodies begin? How does our understanding of the edges of our being influence us? A Complex Definition of a Body is a practice group that aims to add layers of complexity to our understanding of where we end and the world begins.
Starting Jan 14th, 2024
Asynchronous Practice Group on Kinship Circle-
We’ll begin this first season of Between Bodies with a 12-week, asynchronous exploration of what it means to photograph from the body, using all of your senses, open to the whole community. Beginning Sunday, January 14th, Kim Manley Ort will provide a reflection and prompts every two weeks in the Circle space. Together, we’ll explore the question, “What does it mean to photograph from the body?”
Starts March 7th, 2023, meets monthly
First Thursday, 6 - 8 pm ET (9-months)
What defines a body of work? What holds it together? When is it complete? This monthly practice group will be led by Anna Gage Norton and Eric William Carroll.