HOT TAKE: It’s perfectly fine to say that you’re sick and tired of reading about any and all photography workshops, classes, schools, tutorials, channels, and everything else. It seems like everyone is trying to sell you another piece of education.
And you know what? That’s true. Many people are.
Everyone’s out there trying to sell you another piece of education, and you’ve almost certainly stumbled across some total bullshit along the way. Maybe you attended a class that was a complete waste of time. Maybe you found a tutorial, bought it, downloaded it, and realized, "...what a fucking joke." Doesn’t matter. You’ve probably experienced something that made you think, "...this is ridiculous." Seems like there's no real point in investing in education because all people want to do is take my money, and then nothing changes.
We get that. We fully get that. And I’ve been told exactly that about many things in this industry for almost 20 years now.
So we think it’s important to explain our actual philosophy when it comes to teaching:
First and foremost, is it part of how we make a living? Yeah, it is. And do we enjoy being able to make a halfway ok living teaching artists? We certainly do. It’s a wonderful feeling. It’s incredibly fulfilling.
But at the end of the day, here’s the thing: We don’t want you to come *back* to our workshops.
We know that sounds weird, but let me explain...
We want you to come to one of our workshops and leave so inspired and so motivated that a spark has gone off in your brain. Maybe even an explosion. We want you walking away thinking, “Oh shit. I get it now.”
That doesn’t mean your work suddenly becomes exactly what you’ve always wanted the day after the class. (That’s not how any education works!) What we want is for you to leave with seeds planted that take you somewhere you’ve never been before.
We’re very happy, very excited, and very satisfied being people’s "stepping stones".
You come in, you get some ideas. Real ideas. Real concepts. Real motivation and inspiration that actually mean something, not regurgitated half-truths and recycled "best practices" we copy-pasted from someone's website from 2006. Then you take all of that and go in your own direction, with no restraints.
The next time we see or hear from you, we want it to be because your work screams across our social media feeds, shows up in advertising, gets published somewhere, or hangs in an art gallery, and we stop and go, “Damn. Look what they’ve done.”
We didn’t make that artist that. We didn’t tell them exactly what to do or turn them into a copy of either of us.
We just provided a stepping stone.
So when we say we don’t ever want to see you again, obviously that doesn’t mean you’re not welcome to come to another class. Of course you are. What we mean is that we hope the class gives you exactly what we intended it to give you: a huge, nuclear explosion of motivation and inspiration that sends you off on your own path. armed with actually useful knowledge you can truly apply.
That’s what we strive for.
We want to make better artists. We don’t want to limp people along, getting them to pay every month for yet another class where we talk randomly for a few hours, don’t actually help them, and promise abstract, blurry bullshit that can never really happen.
No, nothing like that, ever. We want to help. We want to inspire. We want you to become a better artist. We don’t need you to become either of us.
We each have our own individual paths. You have yours. We want you to become whoever you’re going to become.
We don’t care what experience level you’re at. If you give us a chance and invest in one of our classes, we want you to get a return on that investment. We work very hard to keep artists inspired and give them knowledge they perhaps didn’t have before. And even if you already know some of it, we bet we can help you refine it, rethink it, or at the very least make something you’re already doing more efficient.
That’s what we do. That’s what drives us. That’s what inspires us.
Creating little explosions across the globe as we encounter other artists, then watching to see what they become.
So yeah, with a healthy dose of skepticism, we welcome you to review our upcoming events, all over the country (and soon, in other countries again) and, hey, try us out – test us. See if we're what we say we try to be!
Upcoming: https://www.ninobatista.com/pages/photography-workshops-nino-briana
