EDDIE SOLOWAY TEACHES PEOPLE HOW TO SEE. For 28 years, in a workshop called A Natural Eye, he’s shown participants how to escape their well-worn grooves and look at the world around them with fresh eyes. It’s an immersion into poetry, music, and art that culminates in his students taking what they see and think and feel and putting it into a photograph. Stepping beyond that beautiful postcard scene in front of you, as he puts it, and interpreting it emotionally.
Eddie teaches A Natural Eye all around the country; his upcoming one is in Big Sur with Santa Fe Workshops, where he’s an instructor and mentor.
At heart, he’s a teacher. And a pretty good one – he’s received the Excellence in Photographic Teaching Award from CENTER and was named one of America’s best photography workshop teachers by Photo District News.
We asked him what exactly is going to happen in Big Sur.
You live in the desert, but a lot of your photographs are of water. Explain, please.
Yeah, I’m trying to figure that one out.
I lived in San Francisco and the Bay Area for a dozen years. But even as a kid growing up in Illinois, we would always escape north to Lake Superior. How water constantly changes has always been fascinating to me.
It’s interesting though – I also like to shoot the monsoonal New Mexico skies. I think they’re similar in that they’re full of ethereal emotion, they’re dynamic, they’re moving.
The water’s moving at a fast pace, and I just love getting inside and having an insight, a glimpse into these very ethereal moments, whether in clouds or in the waves. I try to see deeply into that.
In photography, we often make the mistake of wanting to tick off new places all the time. It’s like that Winnebago on the highway with all the national park stickers all over it. What about having one park sticker and saying, I really know this one place well?
Sounds like these workshops are about more than lighting and contrast.
So we’re going to Big Sur, right? In “Song of the Redwood Tree,” Walt Whitman describes a northern coast redwood murmuring out of its myriad leaves.
Let’s talk about how I make a photograph of a redwood murmuring out.
Or in “October,” Robert Frost talks about what happens in autumn:
O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
You know, I’ve never seen a photograph of leaves being wasted, being let go by a tree. So a poem can give us a doorway into a visual idea.
Haiku is the same way. Haiku is a great way to slow people down, to get them to pay attention to what’s going on in front of them, to the essence of this moment. When we take a photograph, we’re trying to capture a moment, to distill a place. That doesn’t come from running fast, that comes from a contemplative approach.
The joy for me is that all of this just keeps filling my well. As I reach to poetry and prose, as I reach to different painters’ work, it all breaks me way outside the strict confines of traditional photography. And I’m just eating that up.
Learn more at santafeworkshops.com/natural-eye
Photo Jeremy Wade
