IN 1969, ELIZABETH OPALENIK left home to the sound of peace marches and her mother saying, I knew you were different from the time you were two. Striking out on her own, she logged time as an accountant and jazz club manager before stumbling into a photo workshop in Maine. Soon after, she sold everything she had and never looked back.
had and never looked back.
Today Elizabeth creates one-of-a-kind images in mordançage, an alternative carbon and platinum process that alters silver gelatin prints into a degraded effect. She also mixes digital and traditional media on handmade paper. She thinks “all good photographs are self-portraits,” adding that “I know that my many former lives manifest themselves in my images.”
Elizabeth has taught extensively at the Santa Fe Photo Workshop, and this fall she’s leading a special course in a place close to her heart: San Miguel de Allende.
Why San Miguel?
Mexico! There’s a gentleness to the culture that I really love. It’s very different from North America.
The workshop in San Miguel is figure work and portraiture, so we work with a lot of models. The models there are just so different. There’s an incredible gentleness in how they express themselves. And, of course, they’re beautiful.
They have an openness, a real trust. They really show themselves to you. Certainly not typical for models. It’s a beautiful vulnerability – they are naked.
I teach from John Berger’s classic book Ways of Seeing, from his essay on naked versus nude. To be naked is letting someone really see you. Someone can be standing in front of me fully dressed and still be naked. I’m more interested in naked than nude.
We all wear masks, right? So you have to get past that. That’s what I’m teaching – how to really see the person.
Then, when you have that connection and get to their essence, you have a real portrait. Because it takes two people to make a portrait. In fact, some piece of that portrait is actually a self-portrait. In some way, it’s really about us.
Photo Elizabeth Opalenik
