SNAPSHOT NARRATIVES . Image dialog as a visual tool

How do the images influence each other? Are they stronger alone or together? How are visual dialogs constructed? In this two-day workshop, we will explore a specific photographic method - image coupling – to decode the power of images communicating with each other, extending their power and creating iconic statements in this way. We photograph together and capture everyday details, urban curiosities, events on the street and the randomness of urban beauty. Then we put images together to create pairs of images – power couples – that fascinate, make us laugh or shock us. Anything is possible when marrying images, we just have to choose the angle we want to take: Humor and absurdity, poetry, shock, dialogue. This workshop aims to expand our understanding of the image from a singular statement to a piece of the puzzle in a larger narrative.

Gert-Jan Stam is a theater maker and studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the Amsterdam School of Writing. His work focuses on the joint development of productions. His do-it-together concepts have been presented in Germany, France, Croatia, Egypt, Japan and China, among others. Together with architect Breg Horemans, he founded TAAT in 2012, a collective working with the latest means of theater and architecture, visual arts and design.

Mirjana Vrbaski, born in Montreal, Canada, and raised in Belgrade, Serbia, lives and works as a freelance artist in Berlin. She completed her Bachelor of Arts in Photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 2010. Since then, she has focused her work on portraiture, where she has developed a distinctive visual signature. Her ongoing series Verses of Emptiness has been widely exhibited internationally, including at Fotomuseum Den Haag (NL), Museum Kranenburgh (NL), and Transformer Station (USA), and is represented in prestigious collections.