Instructor: Maurene Cooper
When: Saturday, June 8 & Sunday, June 9 | 10am - 5pm (one-hour lunch break)
Location: Zip code 18036 (address will be provided to registered participants)
Registration Deadline: Friday, May 31

This is a two-day, hands-on workshop hosted by artist and educator Maurene Cooper at her family farm in Montgomery County, PA. The format and materials used in this workshop mirror her own work on tin with natural light.

In this outdoor, location-based workshop, participants will be introduced to the fundamentals of the wet plate process through tintype. Students will receive hands-on training in trouble shooting a range of location and weather-based scenarios that affect collodion when shooting outdoors. Both days will focus on “how to see and photograph natural light” in a range of outdoor locations.

On day one - Fundamentals of Tintype - students will receive a refresher on the use of large format cameras, as well as demonstrations and hands-on work with pouring collodion, developing in a travel darkroom, and varnishing plates. Students will shoot and produce samples at a range of exposure times in direct and diffused sunlight, as well as full shade.

Day Two: Students will choose their own locations around the property and use the plates from Day One to execute their own images. Students will learn to mix their own chemistry and create organizational systems to identify chemical and light-based fog.

Students are invited to camp on site. A list of local hotels can be provided upon request.

Students will shoot a minimum of six plates each day during the workshop.

Workshop Withdrawal Policy

We recommend choosing workshops with care after reading our withdrawal policy. If you have questions about any of our workshops, please contact dale@thehalideproject.org

Maurene Cooper Bio 

Helen Maurene Cooper is an artist and educator living in Philadelphia, PA. She earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Bard College. She has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally; Onomatopee (Eindhoven, Netherlands), Clare Morris Gallery (Ireland), Soap Factory (Minneapolis), Space Mountain (Miami), and Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation (Chicago).

Her work is represented by Bert Green Fine Art, (Chicago). Awards and Fellowships include: Art is Essential Grant, through the Knight Foundation for her current project for The Caregivers, in both 2020 and 2021, the Cultural Council of Eindhoven, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, and the University of Chicago. Her 2017 monograph, Paint & Polish: Visual Economy and Visual Culture from the West Side (Onomatopee, Eindhoven Netherlands). Paint & Polish was reviewed in Bust.com, New City, Nails Magazine, and the Creators Vice Magazine. Artists' talks have been given at PS1, The Fashion Institute of Technology, Kansas City Art Institute, Elmhurst Art Museum, The Arts Incubator at the University of Chicago, and Oxbow School of Painting.

Cooper began her study of wet plate photography with France Scully Osterman in 2013. People of the Caregivers (2020-Present) is her second body of ambrotype plates.

This workshop has been generously sponsored The Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.