Color Me

Color is a deep and mysterious language. Colors can scream, whisper, command and invite. They can be silly and hysterical, glamorous and serious. They can give us a sense of security and threaten us. If every person were a color, which one would they be?

This two-day workshop celebrates visual and cultural diversity by focusing on color as a photographic stylistic device. Together and in small groups, unconventional, colorful, liberated portraits will be created. Props, objects, makeup and imaginative sources of color can be used to expand one's expressive power. There are no restrictions. What counts is freedom of expression and personal vision.

At the same time, participants will get to know important portrait photographers who have revolutionized the medium with their unconventional visual language and use of color and learn what made them stand out and how they gave photography a new direction. The works of Samuel Fosso, Zanele Muholi, Viviane Sassen, Anouk Kruithof and Nadav Kander, among others, as well as a visit to the current exhibitions by Tyler Mitchell and Studio Rex at C/O Berlin are intended to provide inspiration for the participants' own photographic practice. A photo studio set up especially for the exhibition can be used for the workshop.

At the end of the workshop, participants will take home a unique self-portrait and a new perspective on the possibilities of portraiture.

Mirjana Vrbaski, born in Montreal, Canada in 1978 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.

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.