Join us for a week-long workshop in which you will photograph during the excitement, tumult, and chaos of festival time in Calcutta, India.

Durga Pooja only happens in one Indian city Calcutta. This workshop takes place during a time of visual wonderment in one of the worlds’ most exotic and amazing cities.

In Hindu tradition, the goddess Durga comes to earth for a brief nine day visit every year. The entire city-and those of all religions pray and celebrate her arrival. With the guidance of Peter Turnley, one of the worlds’ pre-imminent photojournalists and workshop teachers, we will explore street photography in Calcutta during the festival days as thousands of people take to the streets in a unique combination of prayer and celebration.

Calcutta, one of the largest cities in India, is special in that it has maintained a relationship to space where all space is public-outdoor markets, street vendors, and the stoop all represent unique photographic opportunities. Calcutta, also home to the famous work of Mother Theresa, is visually like a Fellini film in India-exciting visual/human things are going on in all directions-a true explosion for the senses.

During festival time, the city's population of 7 million people stops working to spend time with family and neighbors.  The heat of the summer has cooled down and people are out, celebrating, eating, visiting makeshift temples and attending outdoor concerts and performances in the evenings. Days are long, offering many hours to photograph in luminous light famous to India. 

We will visit the famous outdoor flower market in North Calcutta, Asia's largest flower market, and the nearby ghats where people bathe in the sacred Ganges river (the Hooghly).  We will visit the Kalighat Temple, where thousands of pilgrims from all over India flock, and photograph.  We will also visit North Calcutta, the most densely populated area of Calcutta, where kids are out on the street playing cricket at all hours and extended families spill out onto porches, lending to a sense of community that makes it the perfect place to practice street photography.  People in the city are uniquely warm and the city is fascinating visually, not only for the people but also for the many modes of transportation on the streets (rickshaws, an old tram line, buses, auto rickshaws and cars) and architecture that is a blend of British colonial and Indian styles, all aged by time.  Nowhere on earth is there as much immediate visual excitement as in India. India is a place for a photographers’ dream and Calcutta exemplifies all that India can offer with its amazing tableau of humanity and color.

The workshop has been timed to begin before the first day of Durga Puja, and continue through the five key days of the festival: Sasthi, Saptami, Ashtami, Navami and Dashami.  Durga Pooja is a celebration of the feminine divine, manifested in the mythological figure of the mother goddess.  For the festival, thousands of life-size idols of the goddess riding a lion (her chosen form of transportation) are created by local artisans and moved throughout the city on trucks.  Makeshift temples are created in colorful cloth tents on the street.  During the first and second days, people visit the temples at night, bringing the goddess gifts and performing religious rituals.  The fourth day involves the indoor festival, when women say goodbye to the goddess, and cover and each other in vermillion, and the final day, when the idols are submerged in the river in a tearful goodbye.  We will be photographing this event, which will be the culmination of the celebration as well as the workshop. 

In daily classes, we will discuss what it means to attempt to photograph an event of such scale. Besides being one of the world’s great photojournalists, Peter Turnley is a renown street photographer and is a master at helping students overcome their timidity of photographing people and daily life. You will learn to think in terms of making single images, but how to create a photo essay/story with a series of images. We will visit some of the 2000 makeshift outdoor temples that are built for the event to house life-size paper-mache idols of the goddess.  We will use our surroundings to enrich our understanding of history and Indian culture, using the camera as a tool to connect with our environment and the people who inhabit it.  Calcutta is a historically and architecturally fascinating city - a place that is home to people of Armenian, British, and Chinese origin as well as those from all over India.  The city has a highly cosmopolitan feel, while it is fast changing in a time of globalization. 

We will shoot, shoot, shoot, edit, and discuss what it means to photograph on the street in a foreign culture, how to capture the "decisive moment" and how to create a meaningful portfolio of photographs.  We will discuss sequence, composition, and color while in a vibrant setting. Daily we will meet as a group for lectures, presentations, and photo critiques of the previous days work.

Students will have exposure to the heart of Bengali culture and leave with an unforgettable experience, personally and photographically.

Companions
This is an ideal workshop to bring along a spouse, son or daughter or partner. Non-photographic companions may join the group sessions and meals but are not involved in the critique or review sessions. Companion supplement is $150.

Hotels
Hotels in Calcutta, listed from least expensive to more expensive (we recommend particularly the Astor Hotel for its convenient location-this is where Peter will be staying):
Fairlawn Hotel, Calcutta (about $50)

*Astor Hotel, Calcutta (about $100)

Lytton Hotel, Calcutta

Kenilworth Hotel, Calcutta (between $100 and $200)

Peerless Inn, Calcutta (about $200)

Arrival
Plan to arrive by Monday afternoon, Oct. 11. The first workshop session will begin at 9am on Tuesday, Oct. 12.

Departures
The workshop ends late afternoon, Monday, Oct. 18, with a final show of the students’ final 15-image photo stories made during the week. Students should plan to depart on Tuesday, Oct. 19. The workshop ends on Monday evening, Oct. 18 with a group dinner.

Technology
This is a digital workshop, taught and conducted with digital cameras. If you wish to shoot film, you may so do, but we suggest you bring it home for processing; to participate in critiques, you will need to use 35mm digital camera. Please keep in mind that the focus of this workshop will be digital and you will be expected to shoot with a digital camera daily. A student should be comfortable downloading their digital images each evening to a folder, and heaving a means for their work to be transported on a flash drive or disc for daily review with Peter Turnley. At the start of the workshop, students will be encouraged to choose if they want to see their work in color or in black and white, and they will be encouraged to stick to their choice of one of the other throughout the workshop.

What to Bring
Besides your SLR digital camera equipment, bring a body of your creative work with you to share—a portfolio or CD of images. Your portfolio can be prints or digital images. The workshop will have an LCD projector and there will be a final show of all of the students work during the final session.

Camera Gear
A digital SLR camera is required. We recommend you bring a 35mm SLR camera you are comfortable with. Students may also work with a high end point and shoot camera such as a Canon G10 or an Olympus Pen camera. Two bodies are recommended, with a minimum of at least one wide-angle lens, such as a 17-35mm zoom, or 24mm, 28mm, 35mm, or 50mm lens. In order to shoot comfortably in low light situations, it will be preferable that students have a wide-angle lens that is relatively fast and has a wide aperture such as 1.4., 1.8. 2 or 2.8. Bring several memory cards (at least 1 gigabyte cards are recommended), extra batteries and necessary battery chargers. Your laptop should have image management software, such as Apple’s Aperture, Adobe’s Light Room or, as Peter suggests, PhotoMechanic, which can be downloaded, free, on a trial basis from the site of Camerabits

Make sure you have a back-up system on which to download each day’s work. This can be your laptop, a portable external hard drive storage device, flash drive, or DVDs. You will need a means of getting your edited images in a folder to Peter each day for review—flash drives are the most practical, but you can also use an external hard drive, or DVD.

Research and preparation
Research and preparation are important parts of any adventure. There are many very thorough guidebooks for Calcutta and extensive information about Calcutta to be found on the Internet.

Meals
The first and last meals are included in the cost of the workshop. You will be a guest of the workshop for a group opening dinner on Tuesday night, and a final dinner on Monday night. Aside from the two group meals, breakfasts, lunches and dinners are independent but students are encouraged to join each other in local restaurants and cafes. Expect to be paying around $50 a day on meals.

For more information about teacher Peter Turnley, please consult his personal web site: peterturnley.com

Turnley has published 5 books of his work:
Parisians
McClellan Street
In Times of War and Peace
Beijing Spring
Moments of Revolution