No one has bothered to introspect or address it yet, but photography workshop model has been broken for a while now. There are many reasons why and I’ll begin by recounting my own experience from late 2007.

Like many, I too was inspired by the usual names, Nachtwey, Bresson and the entire Magnum catalogue. I saw a documentary on David Alan Harvey and his Cuba book. Gave up my job in Dubai, came back to Bombay and begged and pleaded newspapers to hire me. The Indian Express did!

Didn’t take long to realize that the Indian passport isn’t going to make life easy. I was shooting page 3 gigs, and had the same portfolio every Bombay news photog has - holi, diwali, visarjan, cricket, bollywood, floods, building collapse, and once in while, local elections.

A friend told me that Harvey was coming to India to conduct a workshop. I was in HT and wildly excited to go but I had a home loan and approx 1.5 lakhs for a week was just atrocious. My editor thought I was stupid when I asked him to ask the office to fund my participation.

Am not going to convert the 1.5 lakhs to USD or any other currency. Do the math and you’ll know how out of reach it is for someone making 20k a month and managing a home loan. Anyhoo, the organizer of the workshop told me that I could join the workshop as an assistant instead.

My seniors and friends, especially Chirodeep and Fawzan, were instrumental in egging me on. Since I had worked in the Emirates, eoing lota of odd jobs I had anyways no qualms making and serving tea/coffee to people. So I signed up and headed to Nawalgarh via Jaipur.

The location was this gorgeous haveli/kothi. Pretty place with some horses and the usual stuff associated with old world royalty. Apart from me, there was one more photographer on assistant duty. A woman photog. We were to work in tandem.

One of my first jobs was to go pick up David and the participants from Delhi airport. Given the kind of price tag, no surprises that only the absolutely well off and established photographers flew in.

Only one Indian photographer was a participant. A friend who worked and continues to work for the wires, and aid agencies. He managed to secure a discount. Not a big deal, but a few thousand clipped off the whole thing. Still a mammoth sum!

The schedule of the workshop was bizarre. As an assistant I had to be up before all of them, be their guide/fixer when they went out to shoot. Come back, have lunch, do the same shit again, and in the night David would review their work.

Big part of my time with participants was in helping them get into private spaces since they don’t know the language/customs. A namaste is not an entry pass into someone’s house. I found that to be very strange. I was the one building connections, while they would just shoot.

Many of them would take a lifetime to understand the motifs, symbols and this cultural exchange is best done slow. Not as a week long transaction. It was a pain to manage so many folks walking about with cameras and us Indians are very curious.

A major complaint most of the participants had was that there is no story in this village to photograph. Of course there won’t be. What do you expect to happen in a week? Takes more than that for an average person begins to open up and be receptive to a new surrounding!

What was effectively being furthered was this parachute model of photography. You fly in, some one does half of the work for you, you make zero attempts to dive deeper and your only focus is the teacher’s validation. Validation that doesn’t necessarily make you better though!

Of course, if I fly in to Germany or some other country I too will need a translator/fixer. No issues. But let’s be honest. For anyone to even begin getting under the skin of a place, knowing its people and opening up to it takes a little more time than that.

How many people does such a price tag alienate. You call us a third world nation. We are developing photographers so to say. Shouldn’t a workshop be tailored for maximum inclusion of locals so that we develop in sync? Where is the cultural exchange in me doing namaste for you?

If you came to this thread expecting me to reveal creepy behaviour by the mentor or participants, I have nothing on that! I did at one point raise concerns with Fawzan about the number of coffee mugs I had to make everyday and he told me to think of myself as Eklavya.

If you’ve read Mahabharata, one of its more twisted episodes is the exchange between the archer Eklavya and the wily Dronacharya who seeks his thumb as “fees” for all the indirect education, thereby culling his ascent and his skill.

One more fingerless photographer to the already long list is not a thing anyone should aspire to be. Festival after festival I see this pandering, this servile behaviour. The only valuable indirect lesson I received from this workshop was that I don’t want to be like any of them!

In exchange of the workshop duties, I was to get a certificate. Never did care for it, and nor did I get it. I do remember seeing someone steal a copy of David’s book, Divided Soul. Harvey was searching for it in the morning for he had plans to gift it to someone. Oh well.

I think over the years I learnt more from workshops not related to photography. Farming, film appreciation, or even long conversations with non photographers teach you more things that can be deployed in one’s work. All depends on what sort of a photographer you really want to be

The idea of this thread is by no means to sling mud at any collective or an individual. It is simply aimed at making the photographers question their own need for such a “workshop” and for the larger community to acknowledge that the system broken and needs fixing.

As someone pointed out, and I agree, some things have changed since 2007. Not much, a bit. There are other silly things that have come up though and the one that takes the cake is a one hour portfolioe review priced at 350 USD! Who is validating who here?