Gray Team: Grant Morris

Last year, I was lucky enough to have some amazing students on my team at the Eddie Adams Workshop. When watching the final slideshow at the end of the weekend, it was hard not to take pride in the fact that our show was the best because their pictures were the strongest. That final night, you realize the entire weekend - headaches, no sleep, stress, juggling 10 things at once - was totally worth it and that it was rewarding in so many ways.

I've been wanting to do this for a while now, to write about what life is like as a producer. What it's like to have 10 students that you want to try to pull the best out of and that you want to push to get out of their normal habits and excel past where they started and what they thought they were capable of. 10 students that you know very little about at the beginning of the week and you now feel a strong bond with a few days later.

So, I'm going to start by talking about some of last year's students.

Grant Morris. I liked him instantly because he's charming and disarming and had his eyes set on something bigger than himself. At the time he was just finishing up at Brooks and preparing for entry into the real world. He had just had some fabulous pictures from the California wildfires published in Time Magazine. He came in with a solid college portfolio of news, sports, features -- colorful, loud and in your face. So I wanted to give him something that he wasn't used to. Something subtle and quiet.

I gave him an assignment to document life in a 24-hour taxi stand. After a few hours, Grant got a little frustrated. Nothing was happening. It was really, really quiet. So he called to tell me what was, or rather what was not, going on. He told me that he'd found a dance studio down the street and that he thought there was something there. Now as a photo coach, all you can do is probe and push. So I asked Grant if he was sure about his decision. If he'd given the taxi stand all he had and there was nothing more he could do. If the dance studio was going to prove visual and interesting. Yes, yes and yes.

I let him spend the rest of the day there. When he got back to the barn and I started editing his take the dance studio images were ok. Typical. Nothing special. Shitty lighting. And without knowing it he had made some really nice frames at the taxi stand. Much to his dismay, his task the next day was to finish what he started and to keep working the shit out of his original assignment.

We talked a lot about what the story of the taxi guys were. And a big part of their day is sitting around doing nothing. That is the story, I told him. Take pictures of nothing. And boy did he go out and produce. I think he even surprised himself in the end.

One of the best things he said all weekend was toward the end. "These pictures don't even look like I shot them." That's a change of style and substance. That's getting outside your comfort zone and exploring a new way of seeing. That's growth, my friend.

There's a lot to be said for a workshop that can change your life. In a variety of ways, the workshop and Eddie came into my life at a very opportune time. Only a short time before the workshop a relationship that I was in ended very quickly and very poorly. My heart ached and I had no idea how to project that hurt so it stayed bottled up inside. One of the biggest things I took away from the workshop is that everything that we do in this life needs to be centered around love.

Professionally speaking, I left the workshop with key contacts that would help me secure a job after I graduated. It gave me a sense of security that I hadn't possessed prior.

Overall, the workshop changed my life. I could care less about winning awards and receiving praise, but to effect change....what is more rewarding than that?

The thing about the workshop is that when you're going through it, it sucks. It sucks a lot. In the three days the workshop runs, 3-5 hours of sleep might be hard to come by. On top of that, you're producing content that could help you stand out among your peers and the professionals there. It's when you get home that you realize exactly how amazing the entire workshop actually was. It's not until you work on your first project after getting back that you see that your style has changed. You see light different. You see social interaction is a way you never imaged.

I'm glad to say that I'm a member of the Gray Team from workshop number 20.

-- Grant Morris

Check out Grant's website and his blog.