About the Workshop

This intensive photography workshop explores how to craft compelling visual stories through observation, sequencing, and intentional image-making. Using the world around us as our subject, we’ll focus on identifying story ideas, photographing with narrative purpose, and building sequences that include scene-setters, action, interactions, portraits, details, and closing moments. Each day includes guided shooting prompts, discussions of story structure, demonstrations of practical techniques, and supportive group critique. Students will learn to deepen emotional resonance, work intuitively in the field, and shape their photographs into cohesive, meaningful stories. By week’s end, each participant will complete a short narrative ready to share.

This workshop is open to photographers of all levels, provided participants have a basic understanding of their camera and how to adjust exposure settings. Students should be comfortable shooting independently; the workshop will not cover basic camera operation.

Students should bring a mirrorless or DSLR camera.

About the Instructors

Lipe Borges is a Brazilian artist who uses the camera as a tool for connection and storytelling. Focused on portrait and documentary photography, he explores and celebrates the individuality in every person. His work has taken him into prisons, favelas, disaster zones, and vulnerable communities in South America. Rooted in the rhythm and resilience of Capoeira, his art blends movement, presence, and humanity. Based on Cape Cod since 2020, Lipe received the 2023 Creative Futures Fellowship and the 2024 Teaching Artist Development Fellowship from The Cordial Eye, and was selected for the 2024 Creative Exchange Cohort by the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod.

Julia Cumes is a South African–born photographer rooted on Cape Cod whose work traces threads of identity, belonging, and women’s lives around the world. Drawing on her photojournalism background, she uses narrative imagery to explore public health, environmental resilience, and the intimate human stories that define communities from East Africa and South Asia to coastal New England. Her photographs have been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and exhibited nationally and internationally. Named the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod’s 2024 Artist of the Year, she believes in photography’s power to cultivate empathy and reveal overlooked lives.