Chaskielberg graduated from the National Institute of Cinematography of Argentina as Director of photography. He received the BURN Emerging Photographer Grant by the Magnum Foundation in 2009 and was titled World Photographer of the Year 2011 by the World Photography Organization. In 2008 he was invited by the National Geographic Society to participate in the All Roads Photography Program.
Chaskielberg has developed projects in Asia, América, Africa and Europe. His work was presented at the Brighton Biennial curated by Martin Parr in 2009. He exhibited at the Daegu Photo Biennial in South Korea 2014 and the Ballarat International Photography Biennial, Australia 2015. He is a visiting teacher at the Tokyo Institute of Photography and has recently been one of the masters of the first Latin American Masterclass organized by the World Photography Organization.
Images by Wikus de Wet
It’s one year we started our partnership with the International Summer School of Photography (ISSP), a week long "informal education program" that takes place every year since 2006 in the beautiful Latvian countryside. ISSP offers advanced workshops by renowned international tutors in combination with an exciting evening programme of talks, presentations and portfolio reviews.
This year ISSP hosted 72 photographers in 6 workshops leaded by Anouk Kruithof, Paolo Woods, Federico Clavarino, Jason Evans, Alejandro Chaskielberg and Taiyo Onorato.
I was there for the whole duration of the program, in a relaxed and informal environment, where students and teachers (or masters as they are called at ISSP) work side by side in this intense learning/teaching experience. Teaching photography is a topic a lot discussed especially during the last year, this has brought an important attention on the educational system, made by institutions and alternative photography programs.
I wanted to know more about the perception people and professionals have of the meaning of studying (and teaching) photography today, so I went to Latvia to spend some time with the ISSP 2016’s masters talking about their personal experience both as teachers and students.
Elena Vaninetti (EV) - What is your main focus and interest when you teach photography?
Alejandro Chaskielberg (AC) - For me it is important to give to the students inspirational tools coming from different form of arts like: music, cinema, literature. I would like that my students can be completely involved in the subject they are shooting, that they could create what I call 'the creative soup', their own personal world while working on a story.
I am always trying to rethink and to push the boundaries of what we understand as documentary photography. This language changes a lot depending of the way we transform reality with the camera, the way we approach to the subject and all of this has to do a lot with technique. Photography language has changed thanks of the improvements of technique and developments in science, so that is why I think that belong to the natural transformation of the story of photography. I trust a lot in that.
I try to build with my students an strong visual outcome of their works, but at the same time the story and approach has to be strong enough to the aesthetical aspect, otherwise it cannot work well.
(AC) - My personal path was not the typical path to study photography, because i started studying very young and mostly self-taught. I got my first camera at the age of ten, and when I was fifteen I already understood most of the technical aspects of photography. My main formation was in cinematography, so my main inspiration was cinema and not photography. My path at the cinema school was great because it was about creating stories, sometimes fictional and sometimes documentaries. It was also about scriptwriting and working in groups, that was important for me. Then I studied music at the classical conservatory, playing violin. I am a photographer that grew up not inspired or influenced by other photographers, I would say 99 percent of the photographers that i know today, I know since the last five years. I always tried to avoid to see too much photography. It was also a different moment, I grew up i just seeing books basically.
(EV) - Nowadays teaching photography seems a kind of trend, what do you think about the educational system? And how is changing in your opinion?
(AC) - I think that there are a lot of new teachers and schools, on one hand because photography is accessible for everyone. Also a lot of photographers has started to teach due to the lack of work. I am not teaching too much and I am still trying to understand what is the best way to teach. I have a lot of questions about this. Is the best to give information, it is about experience or the best would be to improvise something completely new to the students and the teachers at the same time. Perhaps create something together? What I am sure is that I am not very excited about teaching photography in the more classical way, where a master reviews your portfolio, etc.
I trust more in programs like the ISSP where you can work with a collective of people and the experience is more valuable than the content. I trust a lot in multidisciplinary. I think that sharing in a very horizontal way, is the most interesting part of the ISSP.
Website
www.chaskielberg.comAlejandro's workshop at ISSP 2016: Documentary Experiments
