Instinct and the Frame: Two Ways of Seeing

What happens when we stop trying to make a “good” photograph?

In this five-hour workshop, we will explore two radically different approaches to photographic seeing through the work of Daido Moriyama and William Eggleston. Moriyama’s raw, high-contrast black-and-white photographs often embrace blur, grain, imperfect exposure, tilted frames, and spontaneous shooting—sometimes without looking through the viewfinder at all. Eggleston, working in color, turns his attention toward the everyday and overlooked, creating uncanny compositions in which seemingly insignificant objects and every area of the frame become charged with meaning.

After examining examples from both photographers, we will take these contrasting approaches into the street. During a guided photowalk, participants will spend half their time working in a Moriyama-inspired mode—fast, instinctive, imperfect, and unpredictable—and half working in an Eggleston-inspired mode, slowing down to consider color, ordinary subject matter, spatial relationships, and the entire frame.

We will conclude with a group critique, considering what each approach reveals—and conceals—and how deliberately changing the way we photograph can challenge our assumptions about composition, technique, subject matter, and what makes a photograph successful.