Kinship Gatherings
At Kinship we see the community as the curriculum. Learning is rhizomatic, interconnected, and collaborative. Our weekly gatherings are built around the emerging and changing needs of our community members and feature artists’ talks, cross-disciplinary conversations, and inspiring community exchange. Attending online gatherings is a powerful way to feel connected to our emerging community while fostering new ideas and inspiration for your own practice.
Forums and Salons
Saturday, December 31st @ 7 pm ET
Join us for a spacious, heartful conversation and New Year’s Day community show & share. Together we will mark the end of 2024 and the start of 2025 with images and stories. We want to hear about your inner and outer explorations, questions, triumphs, challenges, and inspirations - and your creative intentions for the coming year.
December 18th @ 7 pm ET on Zoom
Join poet Meghan Sterling and seven Kinship photographers as they explore the ways that ekphrastic poetry can deepen our relationship with our own photographs and photography practice. While ekphrastic poetry is often defined as the writing of poetry about works of visual art, the tradition is truly focused on the close observation of objects and experiences. This makes ekphrastic poetry a beautiful venue for deepening one’s relationship to one’s photographs.
December 11th @ 7 pm ET on Zoom
Over seven meetings, this practice group explored relationships surrounding a focus of their choosing, considering physical, emotional and visual contexts, and responding to unexpected disruptions.Fungi, trails, trees, and other plants led to new ways of thinking about and sharing nature’s intelligence, empathy, and connections.
December 4th @ 7 pm ET via Zoom
Between January and November 2024, seven members of the Kinship Photography Collective gathered thirteen times to ‘reimagine’ loss and grief. Part of the year-long theme “Between Bodies,” this practice group wondered if there was a visual language for loss and how patiently dwelling with grief might also offer opportunities for nurturing community.
Wednesday, November 27th @ 7 pm ET on Zoom
Convergence, Parker J Pfister’s current exhibition, is guided by curiosity, wonder, time, and life experiences. Sending a probe into his vast archive of photographs, over 3 decades worth, Parker Pfister discovers deeper meanings and purpose in his work. Photographic prints are combined in a hands-on tactile way, creating new narratives and questions. A once straightforward photograph is now a complex conversation.
Wednesday, November 20th, at 7 pm ET on Zoom
Please gather with us in the "tender light" of community as we share photographs from a time in our lives when we were struggling and the gentle light of love, beauty, or wholeness revealed itself to us through our photographic practice. Together we will explore the ways that photography can be a light, even, and sometimes especially, in darker moments.
Wednesday, November 13th @ 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Over the course of seven years, Tina Freeman photographed the Louisiana wetlands and Arctic and Antarctic glaciers. In Lamentations, Freeman pairs images from each place in a series of diptychs that function as little stories about climate change, ecological balance, and the connectedness of things across time and space. The large, color photographs in Lamentations make plain the crucial, threatening, and global dialogue between water in two physical states.
November 6th @ 7 pm ET on Zoom
In this practice group, participants explored the feelings of place. Guided by Trebbe Johnson, practice group participants worked with hyperawareness (or “fierce consciousness”) to more deeply explore the reactions that places stirred in them. Together they opened the lenses of their imaginations and emotional bodies to contemplate the profound relationships they have with locations that they hold and are held by them—creating images that reveal a powerful, often mysterious, and always intimate world.
Wednesday, October 30th @ 7 pm EDT on Zoom
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 began with practicing self-directed deep attention and curiosity and ultimately considered the ways that our relationship and understanding of our own bodies influence the ways that we hold relationships between bodies.
Wednesday, October 23rd @ 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Join us for a portfolio share with Lyn Swett Miller. This tender body of work questions the essence of reciprocity between humans and the land while exploring the ways in which a ‘green’ death can reveal the beauty of our relationship between the human body and the earth’s body. Together we will explore whether photography can help us find redemption and joy in previously unmentionable settings.
Wednesday, October 16th, at 7 pm ET on Zoom
It is time to weave our Between Bodies explorations into galleries, featured projects, exbhibitions, and collaborative shenanigans. Join us this Wednesday as we walk you through the submission process. Together we will begin building the schedule for community sharing, online galleries, and upcoming exhibitions.
Wednesday, October 9th, 7 pm ET on Zoom
Fall is here, and it is time to gather our community together to look for unique ways to weave our Between Bodies explorations and photographs into featured galleries, collaborative calls, and exhibitions. Do you have work in process that would be a good fit for our featured artist gallery? Would you like to curate a collection of work? Are there curators or editors you would like us to invite to our community to help interpret the work we have created? Please join us!
Wednesday, Sept. 25th @ 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Kari Varner is a Binghamton, New York-based artist who utilizes a variety of historical and experimental photographic processes in explorations of industry and human presence upon the landscape. Drawing from the environment as both subject and material, her images are often formed from substances enacting change in the land and water. Together we will explore the dialogue between photographs and materiality, along with the value we assign to altered environments.
Wednesday, Sept. 18th @ 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Jade Doskow, as the Photographer-in-Residence of Freshkills Park in New York’s Staten Island, has been creating a massive photographic record of this notorious site as it transforms from the world’s largest household waste dump to one of New York’s largest parks. In today’s world, with an increasingly fraught relationship between humanity and the natural world, can an understanding start to shift of what a natural parkland looks like and how it functions?
Wednesday, Sept. 11th @ 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Join artist Brenda Spielmann as she shares her project Luminaries, a project where she photographs para-athletes and hand-embroider their images with metallic thread on photographic paper. Rooted in her personal connection to the disabled community through her son, who was born with a disability, this project emphasizes Brenda’s belief in the power of representation and the significance of diverse perspectives.
Wednesday, Sept. 4th @ 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Join us for our final summer peer review featuring work by Barron Northrup and Tracy Warren. Tracy will be sharing work from her newest project where she places self portraits into the landscapes she photographs. Barron will be sharing work from "Buddy you're dying and I hate that for you," which focuses on the past and present impacts of the covid pandemic. Please join us.
Wednesday, August 28th at 7 pm ET on Zoom
Join us for a practice group meet and greet, ask questions, and find the practice group that best supports your creative practice. Attendees of the open house will get early access to practice group registration.
Wednesday, August 21st @ 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Are you working on a photobook or zine and have a burning question you’d like answered? Join Erik Mace for a community skillshare on photobooks, where he’ll lead a discussion on all things book-related. Together, we’ll discuss photobook ideation, design, or production, combining the best of a Q&A and a community-driven skillshare.
Wednesday, August 14th, 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Join us for our fifth peer review featuring work by Chris Allen and Sasha Chapman. Chris will be sharing recent work of a multi-year project exploring the planetary element of Water in it's various phases. Sasha will be sharing her newest project that features ice as an archive and its retreat as a form of memory loss.
Wednesday, July 31st, 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Join us for our fourth peer review featuring work by Greg Garner and Sara Swaty. Greg will be sharing recent work from a long-term that examines interior parking decks in natural light. Sara will be sharing her project Samakara: Bodywork a self-portrait project that documents her medical and emotional progress on a lifelong journey of a physical enigma / disability.
Wednesday, July 17th, 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Join us for our third peer review featuring work by Paul Wanta & Susan Patrice. As a photographer and naturalist, Paul’swell-honed skills as a tracker and wayfinder inform his photography practice, inviting photographs that are both familiar and surprising. Susan will be sharing work from her ongoing project The Land of My Body where she ponders the stories the land wants to tell and whether art can offer both healing and ecological reparation.
Wednesday, July 10th, 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Join us this week for our second summer skill-share. This week we will be exploring self portraiture. What compels us to turn the camera around and photograph ourselves? Through embodied photographic practices, what can we learn from making images of ourselves? What can emerge between us and the camera, between us and the viewer? What makes an image a self portrait? Is it the presence of the photographer in the frame, or can we make an image of ourselves where our physical body is absent? Join us as we share photographs, process, and inspiring prompts.
Wednesday, July 3rd, 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Join us for our second summer review with George Lottermoser & Frances Bukovsky. George will be sharing his project Mirror, Mirror where he places a mirror between lens and subject allowing him to document two different events and two different spaces from a singular point of view. Frances will be sharing work from their project Upheaval which seeks to unravel the complicated relationships between body, place, and memory as impacted by trauma and illness.
Wednesday, June 26th, at 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Join us for an inspiring conversation with Benjamin Dimmitt about his powerful and heartbreaking book An Unflinching Look: Elegy for Wetlands that explores the salt-damaged sawgrass savannas and spring creeks of the Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge on Florida’s Gulf Coast. For Benjamin, creating this book was a way of examining and reckoning with ecosystem loss in a place he knows well and loves.
Join us for our first summer review with Anna G. Norton. Anna will be sharing her long-term documentary project that features longleaf pine restoration on her family property in Baker County, GA which she is crafting into a book. Like many of us who are working on long-term projects, Anna is looking for guidance on what to keep and what to let go of. Does including a larger number of images help capture the complexity of the story or water it down? Where is the line between enough and too much?
Wednesday, June 12th, 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Join us this week for the first in a series of Kinship skill-shares. This week we will be exploring lumen printing and showing you how to make your own prints at home. Lumen prints are photograms made by placing an object, often organic materials, on photographic paper and exposing the paper to sunlight (no darkroom is needed). This simple, open, and experimental process produces luminous, magical, and often surprising results.
Join us this summer for peer supported project and portfolio reviews. Peer reviews are not critiques but a chance to share your work within a highly supportive environment where you can ask thoughtful questions about your work in progress and receive equally thoughtful reflections in return. Photographers of all levels are invited to share work. Would you like to share your work this summer?
Join us via Zoom Wednesday, May 29th, 7 pm EDT
At Kinship, community engagement is rhizomatic, interconnected, and collaborative. Our calls-for-engagment, programs, and practice groups, are built around our community's emerging and changing needs. What would best supports your practice this summer? Please lend your voice and vision to this weeks dynamic conversation and help us shape our summer season.
Wednesday, May 22nd, 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Over the past month, Kinship community members have been responding to three prompts adapted from Joanna Macy and Molly Brown’s book Coming Back to Life and recently featured on We Are The Great Turning podcast.
Join us as Kinship community members share the photographs and reflections that arose in response to the prompts.
Wednesday, May 15th, 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Many of us yearn to deepen our intimacy and connection with the world. Please join us as seven photographers explore and contemplate the role that photography can play as a tool for deep listening and intimate conversing.