2020_05_05_ARQ_curso_fotografia

Rooftops and trees seen from a window, hands holding on to a fence, a woman cooking, a forgotten racket, a roll of toilet paper... These are just some of the images that prospective students of the School of Architecture have made in the online workshop, Seeing is believing, Looking is creating. 65 students from high school diploma recently participated in this photography workshop that aimed to send some graphic messages from confinement.

Participants learned everything from how to take a photo with an interesting framing to sensitizing and sharpening the eye; how to convey a mood through images or turn something ordinary into an extraordinary event.

"Our intention was that the photographs of the students themselves would tell what they reflected during these sessions and why not, the present moment: their own chapters. Therefore, we launched a photographic project graduate 'A message in the bottle': A graphic letter to throw into the sea of uncertainty, almost a rescue of what once made photography something magical: treasuring time and recovering it in the future," describes Alicia Fernández Barranco, architect and director of the course.

The architect, filmmaker and former student of the School, Patxi Burillo, was another of the teachers. He states that one of the objectives of the workshop was to provide the students with theoretical and practical tools to deal with images. "Stimulating them was, without any doubt, one of our objectives, trying to instill in them the great fascination we feel for the image as a scientific and poetic tool , as a way of being in the world and unraveling it."

And the architect and former student of the School, Carlos Mangado, emphasizes the good performance of the online course: "It is true that the face-to-face point of complicity and immediacy is limited, but two factors have counterbalanced this 'problem': the high participation and the Degree of involvement of students, and having used the workshop as a creative escapetool to the undefined status that unfortunately we have to live".

For their part, the students appreciate the possibility of looking at and taking photographs from different perspectives that they have learned during the sessions. "I found it very interesting, especially the factors to take into account before taking a photograph. I was really unaware of all the work behind it, and now I see photographic works with different eyes," says Carmen Aragonés, a native of Madrid. Álvaro Alonso, from Pamplona, was another participant and describes his experience as follows: "I found the online workshop very interesting and it has helped me to disconnect a little in this status of crisis and confinement. I have learned to see the images beyond what they are, to see the references and thoughts that may be behind them, as well as other issues such as framing, lighting, etc.".