CREATIVE IMMERSION:
“BERKELEY EDITION”
JUNE 20-22, 2025
DESCRIPTION
We are delighted to bring back a special “Berkeley Edition” of FotoFilmic’s CREATIVE IMMERSION program in late June to be led by three exceptional photography mentors from the Bay Area: renowned artist and Magnum Photos member Carolyn Drake, Pier 24 Photography Director Allie Haeusslein, and acclaimed independent Photography Director and Consultant Emily Keegin!
CREATIVE IMMERSION is a small retreat-like program welcoming a small group of practitioners to engage with notable artists, editors, and curators from the photo world. The core of the program is review-based, allowing for in-depth conversations to form about the participants’ work and practice, while helping to forge meaningful and lasting relationships in a spirit of photographic camaraderie.
The first FotoFilmic CREATIVE IMMERSION edition took place at Bowen Island’s historical namesake lodge in the fall of 2019 with Carolyn Drake, Lucy Conticello, Director of Photography at M Magazine Le Monde, and Richard Renaldi participating. In 2020, due to pandemic restrictions, the second edition was conducted online with photographers Cristina de Middel and Mark Neville, and Joanna Milter, Director of Photography at The New Yorker.
This CREATIVE IMMERSION: “Berkeley Edition” will take place in a unique early 20th-century home, nestled in the Berkeley Hills. The residence holds special photographic significance as the former home of legendary FSA photographer Dorothea Lange, who lived and worked there in the 1930s with her husband, economist Paul Taylor. Lange built a darkroom on the property, where she developed some of her most well-known works.
Against the backdrop of this remarkable photographic legacy, we are thrilled to offer the global photography community a unique opportunity to immerse themselves in the Bay Area’s dynamic contemporary photographic culture. Over the course of three intensive days, participants will engage in conversations and portfolio reviews, with ample opportunities to connect during morning and evening downtimes—including a dinner hosted by our friend and longtime collaborator, artist Lucas Foglia.
Creative Immersion “Berkeley Edition” retreat venue. Courtesy Lucas Foglia.
Looking west to San Francisco, rooftop view. © Lucas Foglia.
MENTORS
CAROLYN DRAKE
Carolyn Drake is a member of Magnum Photos, and is also represented by and Yancey Richardson Gallery. She is currently based in Vallejo, California. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lange-Taylor Prize, the Anamorphosis photo book prize, a Fulbright fellowship, a World Press Photo award and the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award. Her work is held in the collections of the U.S. Library of Congress and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In making her five acclaimed photography books to date, Drake traveled for extensive periods of time over the past two decades to witness, document and give voice to underrepresented communities from Turkey (Two Rivers, 2013), to Western China in the Uyghurs region (Wild Pigeon, 2014), to Ukraine (Internat, 2017), to rural Mississippi (Knit Club, TBW Books, 2020). In contrast, Men Untitled (TBW Books, 2023), is a new series of photographs exploring her relationship to myths of masculinity in American culture where her subjects are uprooted from any geography. Her latest publication, Ill let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours (Mack, 2024), is a collaboration with her longtime partner Andres Gonzalez in Mexico/US border towns.
ALLIE HAEUSSLEIN
Allie Haeusslein is a Director at Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco, the largest space in North America dedicated to photography. She conceived and edited the book Photographers Looking at Photographs: 75 Pictures from the Pilara Foundation, published in 2019. Her writing and interviews have been included in exhibition catalogues and monographs, and have appeared in publications such as Aperture, ART21 Magazine, B
