Today I went to a photography workshop at FOAM Amsterdam, which is why this posting is a bit later than you might expect.

The photo museum on the Keizersgracht (Emperor’s Canal) organizes a different workshop each month, and this month the theme was still lifes, tying in neatly with FOAM’s birthday exhibition Still/Life. The workshop fee of thirty bucks gets you a guided tour through the museum in which the teacher points out what makes specific photos special. After that you get a short generic introduction to the basics of interesting photos, and then you get an hour to practice what you have been taught. At the end one photo per student gets discussed. I thought it was well worth the money.

Why a still life exhibition? Curator Colette Olof explains on Youtube:

This year we’re celebrating FOAM’s tenth anniversary. The whole year we’re looking towards the future with the question: “What’s next?” We thought it would be nice to make one exhibition with a theme based on the history of FOAM. In 2001 we opened the very first exhibition at FOAM with a Dutch theme, The Dutch Light, and it was a group show with Dutch photographers curated by Erik Kessels. Now ten years later we thought it would be nice to do a group show again with only Dutch photographers.

[…] The still life is also a classical Dutch theme. In the 17th century the Dutch and Flemish painters were known as the best still life painters in the world.

The Still/Life exhibition runs through October 26. My boring attempt below.

(Illustration top: Fruit, 2008, Krista van der Niet)