Todd Hido: Sources & Influences

Sources and Influences, a workshop with Todd Hido, ran over the weekend of September 21 and 22, providing students with a formidable lesson in how to shape one’s career as a photographer. A skilled professor, Hido lectured on his own experiences, principles, and methods. The course enabled students to draw inspiration not only from the precedent set by their instructor, but also from new perspectives on their own portfolios.

From the students:

“Todd was extremely generous sharing his experiences as a photographer and his vast knowledge of the history of photography. He also gave each student excellent feedback. This was a terrific experience!”
“Hearing Todd explain his sources and influences really got me to think about discovering my own.”

Nocturnal illumination, weather phenomena, and differing temperatures of electric light lend an eerie quality to Todd Hido’s unique landscape photographs. Join Hido as he shares his expertise in a weekend workshop for artists and documentarians alike. The course will cover the experiences, strategies, and influences that form and shape a photographer’s career. Hido will describe in detail the process of making his new book, Excerpts from Silver Meadows. He will candidly present his own work and provide answers to the elusive questions all photographers ask themselves: Where does my work come from? What does it say? How can I express myself more effectively? What does it mean—and does that even matter? The friendly review of student portfolios will follow, and each student will receive personalized feedback and tasks for improvement. Students will also study the precedent set by other photographers as a rich source of inspiration. The workshop’s main objective is to provide students with a framework for intuitive self-discovery and the merging of one’s practice and one’s everyday life. Lunch will be served.

Todd Hido (born in Kent, Ohio, 1968) is a San Francisco Bay Area–based artist whose work has been featured in Artforum, New York Times Magazine, Eyemazing, Metropolis, The Face, I-D, and Vanity Fair. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among other institutions. He has published more than a dozen books, including Excerpts from Silver Meadows (2013). Hido earned a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Boston, and an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, Calif., and is an adjunct professor at the California College of Art, San Francisco.