Luceo’s meets always feel like part workshop, part slumber party, and part business meeting.  This year’s New York meet was probably our busiest yet since we started including individual photographer reviews at the end of each day.  It made for a really nice addition, something to ground our more serious planning to the creative process that is so central to our organization.  Each photographer had about an hour to recap their year by projecting their work for group critique.  My favorite thing about these sessions was not really the technical talk, but the ideas that get tossed around when other people are looking at photographs.  For most of us in the group, pictures are more than an exercise in telling a literal story; they are a way of moving through the world, a means to access beauty, something that is integral to our personal development.  This makes critique sessions sound more like therapy, the key to each photographer’s improvement being a matter of addressing their own fears and stumbling blocks.  You know, the kinds of things that usually require someone else to see clearly.

While there I made two series of images.  This is the first.  The second will follow tomorrow.