The Next Step: Refining Your Creative Voice

This five week in-person seminar is designed to help artists working with photography to pursue your personal creative growth trajectory. The course provides guidance and structure to enable exploration of values, questions, interests, and needs in art-making. The desired outcome is to better understand your own priorities and creative direction and equip you to continue to develop a personally meaningful creative voice and your own significant questions. The outcome may involve developing a personal project.

Participants will be led through writing exercises, discussion, and presentations in a mutually supportive environment to identify, articulate, and develop the meaningful aspects of your practice, and explore future directions and next steps in advancing your practice.

We will look at examples of different kinds of projects and discuss different ways of thinking about and living a photography practice. The course leader will bring in relevant examples throughout the course and raise key questions including the relationship of a body of work and an ongoing practice and considering audiences and reception.

Skill Level/Experience

For artists with a commitment to an original practice, who may have been practicing for any amount of time. This may involve having found subjects, methods, and questions that they are addressing in a personal way, and/or a strong interest in certain questions or possibilities around photography, certain subject matter, or methods and techniques that feel personally meaningful.

Schedule

We will meet weekly on Tuesday evenings from 6-8pm at the Silver Eye Education Center between November 10–December 8, 2026.

Week 1: Tuesday, November 10, 6-8pm

Introduction and sharing about practices and goals. Writing exercise exploring values and needs.

Week 2: Tuesday, November 17, 6-8pm

Discuss our expectations of art-making, relationship between art-making impulses and intuitions and the forms that circulate in the world. Writing exercise: who is your work for?

Week 3: Tuesday, November 24, 6-8pm

Discuss open-ended projects; share the core of your practice with the class (group one); individual 1:1.

Week 4: Tuesday, December 1, 6-8pm

Discuss presentation forms; Share the core of your practice with the class (group two); individual 1:1. Assignment: present reflections on trajectory.

Week 5: Tuesday, December 8, 6-8pm

Present the guiding questions that may inform you moving onwards, and next steps in thought, practice, and attention

Register

The five-week course registration fee is $250.00

Register by 5pm on Tuesday, November 3!

If you would like to take this workshop and need financial assistance, please contact sobia@silvereye.org. A limited number of bursary seats are available.

Intructor Bio:

Leo Hsu (he/him), Executive Director of Silver Eye Center for Photography, is interested in the many ways that making and living with photographs shapes and is shaped by experience, and in how the photography's tensions and possibilities are simultaneously troubling and energizing. He has worked as a writer and editor for Fraction Magazine and Foto8 and as a news photographer. He taught in photography at Carnegie Mellon University and studied anthropology at New York University. He grew up in Pittsburgh, inspired by Silver Eye, and returned to the city after many years away.