2025 Summer Workshop Program

Ron Amato The Environmental Portrait July 20 to July 25, 2025 Time 9 am - 12 pm Discipline: Photography Materials Fee: $25.00 Open To All On-site Housing NOT Available - Off-site Housing Options

Since its discovery in the mid-nineteenth century, photography has primarily focused on one subject: people. Unlike other visual arts, photographs often reveal unique aspects of their subjects and, as seemingly objective records, are readily accepted as reality. Yet photographers have always shaped this reality, guiding it to reflect their vision. Pioneers like Mathew Brady, Peter Henry Emerson, and Jacob Riis significantly influenced public perception through environmental portraiture.

Environmental portraiture has not only endured but thrived in today’s image-saturated world. With cameras in nearly every pocket, people are developing a visual language shaped by a lifetime of consumed images. This workshop will explore environmental portraiture through figures like Dorothea Lange, Arnold Newman, Mary Ellen Mark, and Richard Renaldi, with an emphasis on the fundamentals of composition.

Students will complete portrait assignments in teams, creating diverse outcomes, and then come together as a class to critique the work. By the end, students will understand how to shape an environment using focal length, manipulate natural light to direct the viewer’s eye, and choose impactful camera angles.

Please bring a camera with the ability to set exposure manually. 

Optional Camera Features:
ability to shoot a raw file; ability to change lens or focal lengths

Optional Equipment/Software:
Tripod; Speedlight; Adobe Lightroom; Additional Lenses

Biography

Ron Amato is a Professor in the Photography and Related Media Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. In addition to his extensive career in commercial photography, Ron has published three monographs, and his work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. His most recent book, Artists of Provincetown (2024), is a collection of eighty-four portraits of artists with strong connections to Provincetown, Massachusetts, created over an eight-year period. This work culminated in an exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in the summer of 2024. Amato holds a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, NYC, and an MFA in New Media Art and Performance from Long Island University.