Visual anthropology workshop

Just as you learn to read words, in this workshop Cristina will teach you how to read images. We live surrounded by images — personal, historical, social — that profoundly influence how we think about the world and ourselves. But what does our gaze really mean? What do we see in a photograph? And, above all, what do we project onto it, consciously or unconsciously?

This visual anthropology workshop is an invitation to reflection, creation, and dialogue through images. You will work with personal photographs and archival images, whether real or unknown, to explore the connections between memory, identity, and visual narrative. The workshop includes a theoretical component and several practical exercises in which you will create collages and image-based narratives, discovering how “reality” changes depending on how images are juxtaposed and the meanings we choose to assign to them.

The workshop creates a safe space for visual exploration, where personal experience is the starting point and the image becomes a tool for self-knowledge and authentic connection with others. You may also bring your own images from your family archive if you want to better understand how to look at them and what information you can extract from them. At the same time, Cristina will bring a sufficient number of images for the exercises, so you can also work exclusively with those provided.

What you will learn:

• how to “read” an image critically and empathetically (to decipher when it was created, details about the people in the image based on clothing, posture, positioning, etc.);

• how to construct a personal photographic mini-narrative;

• how the same images can tell completely different stories — in other words, you will practice your critical thinking and gain useful knowledge in visual anthropology.

Workshop schedule:

• Saturday, June 20, 2026, 11:00 – 17:00

• Sunday, June 21, 2026, 11:00 – 17:00

Course details:

The workshop is intended for people interested in images, storytelling, memory, and identity, regardless of professional or artistic experience. It may be particularly useful for people who work with others, such as educators and cultural workers; artists and photographers; those active in the humanities; or individuals going through a process of reflection or reconnection with their own biography. No knowledge of photography is required.

About the lecturer, briefly:

Ana-Cristina Irian is a research-based artist, researcher, and curator, active in the field of collections, photographic archives, and multimedia projects. She studied sociology (Trento and Regensburg), visual anthropology (Bucharest and Perugia), and holds a PhD in Visual Arts from the National University of Arts in Bucharest. Her artistic practice, guided by the motto No one left behind, focuses on objects of memory and integrates photographic materials into contemporary art works. She has participated in over 50 exhibitions in Romania and abroad and is a member of the Union of Visual Artists of Romania and the European platform Futures.She has been involved in projects such as Dacia 50 – an ethnography of the Dacia car after its 50 years, The Wells of Oltenia – a mapping of community wells in southern Romania, Arhive poVestite – recovery and promotion of private photographic archives, Fragmentum, Heretheylived, #mili-eu, Ileana, Mr. B’s grandmother, Debara, Sacoșa Est–Vest – Freedom.Body.Resistance, EERIE, The Titans– research based art. She published the object-book STRATA / B (Omnia Photo, 2020), and her visual experiments from 2016–2020 became two artist books included in the European Versopolis collection. She is the author of Photographic Collections and Archives Today, in the Digital World (2022) and The Production of Space and the Social Life of Artworks in the Street (2024). In 2024, she was a finalist at the LensCulture Art Photography Awards. Her most recent project, The Titans and the Vanishing Green, is presented at Chester Photo Festival 2025.