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Art is Freedom without Limits
Culture is an invisible license and art is a playing ground. Inspiration comes to it when society needs visions, dreams, and new ideas.
The world of art is ruled by fantasy. It is inhabited by the utopic, the imaginary, the fabulous. In it you can find feelings, impressions, attitudes: the unsaid and the unseen.
At the same time, it is up to the students to define what art is, to find out whether there is something else to it, for art is like outer space, never-ending and with no borders, without purpose or reason.
Art is limitless freedom.
Art is the hope for the impossible: to make art is to articulate that hope, to visualize the impossible. To create a new reality.
Society can use art as a mirror to reflect the time it lives in, its failures, its future. The artists can use it to identify themselves, to realize their concealed ideals and hidden fears. To be able to trust in themselves, people need to know themselves. To know what they want, what they are good at, what they are able to do. Who they are.
We can identify ourselves within the kind of art we produce. Art is the looking glass that makes people free.
People have a need to express themselves, either through language or through visions.
Some are eloquent through words, others through images. It is not unusual for those who have failed at ordinary public school to excel at Fatamorgana because verbal literacy is less important than visual creativity.
Such people need Fatamorgana. The school is meant for them.
Fatamorgana's task is to release the students' suppressed and unused energy and to emancipate their fantasy.
Motivation and the Quest for Experimentation
Fatamorgana, the Danish School of Art Photography, provides education in the art of photography and photojournalism.
The education builds upon motivation and the quest for experimentation. It is only through motivation that we benefit from studying, and it is only through our own experiences that we become wiser.
Excellency is achieved through repeated exercise, and self-esteem is founded upon the realization that we have developed ourselves.
With respect to the individual needs and attitudes, the school encourages the students to experiment and fosters their ability too make choices of their own and take responsibility.
A term at Fatamorgana improves personal awareness, bolsters consciousness and creativity, acquaints with the world of photography and art, and serves an invitation to partake of it.
The school encourages the students to do away both with their own preconceived notions and with the expectations of others, with the predictable and the commonplace, and inspirits them to use their own work to manifest their respect for photography as a medium.
The school's workshops are a living environment 24 hours a day, where people with the same interests meet and partake of each other's experiences. Committed young people meet other young people who share the same interests, the same dreams, and the same language.
A study at Fatamorgana prepares the students for further studies at a fine arts academy or at a university abroad, where the competition from all over the world is strong.
For some, Fatamorgana is the springboard to further education, while for others it is the beginning of a professional career as documentary photographers or visual artists.
Courses
The school holds two annual courses, a spring course from February to June and an autumn teams from September to July.
The one-year photography program consists of a fall semester and spring semester as well as access to the school in January and June.
Some knowledge of Danish is a prerequisite.
A four-month course consists of 16 weeks of instruction and the one-year old photography training of 44 weeks of which 32 weeks of instruction.
Students work on assignments or self-selected projects. Documentary and visual arts, photography and video, and get acquainted with all genres of photography: reportage, portrait, staged and processed images.
Each task completed with an examination where the students come with praise and criticism and the pictures are allowed to show what they can tell. Without explanations, comments or linguistically accessories. To listen to the images is part of the exercise.
Guest teachers, both documentary photographers and visual artists, teaches six weeks, the rest of the period are Morten Bo teacher.
One day a week there teaching in image editing.
At the end of each semester provides imaging agents, artists and photographers portefolio review with the character of masterclass: consultations attended by interested students and guests.
Students in the second semester working with a few major projects under supervision. Once a week we meet with the group supervisor to discuss the week's work. Where students in first semester, primarily working with the image on the sketch plan, they have the second and third semester time to do thorough work. Time to obtain special permits do thorough research, intensive sessions and most importantly, low omoptagelser of what has not worked.
Students make use of the experience they got in the first semester, but is now concentrating on a particular genre or personal expression. They specialize, test and develop a routine.
Or they will resume experiments that were terminated prematurely, trying to find a line in the chaotic collection of impressions they received in the first four months.
At 16 weeks given the school a total of 960 hours of training to 30 students. Afslutningsopgavene will be exhibited in the house in Magstræde, at Carlsberg in Gallopperiet or similar place in Copenhagen.
The school's annual summer offerings is available at sommer.fata.dk when the program is established around Easter.
Teachers
Fatamorgana was founded in 1989 by Morten Bo and and recently, after 11 years in a small apartment in Copenhagen's city center, moved to larger facilities on Strandlodsvej on Amager.
Morten Bo is the school's manager and headmaster. Amongst the school's freelance professors and visiting photographers are visual artists such as Anders Petersen, Antoine D'Agata, Astrid Kruse, Birgitta Lund, Ada Bligaard Søby, Charlotte C. Haslund-Christensen, Erik Steffensen, Eva Merz, Henrik Saxgren, Jan Grarup, Jens Olof Lasthein, JH.Engstrøm, Kent Klich, Kine Ravn, Lars Beck, Lisa Strömbeck, Martin Lehmann, Nicolai Howalt, Nina Korhonen, Per Morten Abrahamsen, Rebekka Ehlers, Thora Dolven Balke, Tina Enghoff, Tove Kurtzweil, Trine Søndergaard and Tuija Lindström.
Rasmus Rosenberg Hansen is teacher in technic.
Supervisors are visual artists Anders Kirkegaard, Jytte Rex, Bjørn Nørgaard, Kirsten Justesen, Ursula Reuter Christiansen, Martin Asbæk and the photographers Casper Dahlhof, Simon Ladefoged, Marianne Grøndahl, Charlotte Østervang, Kent Klich and Arne Bro. The international artists who have visited the school include Nan Golding, Sebastiao Salgado, Mary Ellen Mark and Martin Parr.
The school is highly respected by a number of international schools of photography, art academies, and universities.
The International Center of Photography in New York, the Glasgow School of Art and Högskolan för Fotografi och Film, Göteborg University, There are always several of Fatamorgana's graduates that go on to attend these schools.
The school has a good reputation not only abroad. The Development Fund of the Danish Ministry of Culture has allocated a large donation to Fatamorgana, the National Bank's Anniversary Fund has approved four applications for grants, and on 22 June 1998 in Amalienborg, the Royal Palace, His Royal Highness's Prince's Fund submitted a grant to the Fatamorgana School of Photography as represented by photographer Morten Bo "in acknowledgment of its active and efficient contribution."
- During the past 10 years Fatamorgana has functioned as a significant breeding ground for Danish photography.
Prior to the school's foundation, Morten Bo had decided to fill the gaping hole in the Danish system for art education called photography.
Inspired by Christer Strömholm's legendary Photography School of the North in Stockholm, Morten Bo started the school that has since produced a number of accomplished photographers such as Superflex, Johnny Jensen and Nicolai Howalt, to name but three who now use wildly diverging methods of photographic expression.
Many graduates of the school have successfully undergone the test of such international institutions as the International Center of Photography in New York, the Glasgow Art Academy, Fotohögskolan in Gothenburg, Sweden, and Denmark's Royal Academy of Art and Film School.
It is indisputable that Fatamorgana, Denmark's School of Art Photography, has served as a meeting point for all those who in the broadest possible sense are making Denmark's photography today.
Even though the school does not have the status of an official higher education institution, in the course of 10 years it has provided education or preparatory courses to art and documentary photographers and has thus made its mark in Danish photography. (...)
Considering the school's anniversary book, there can be no doubt that Fatamorgana will never stagnate, but will instead follow the times and continue playing its significant role as the breeding ground for Danish photography.
Facilities and Equipment
The school premises in a former administration building for an older, closed factory on Strandlodsvej on Amager.
In a neighborhood with a mix of old garages and modern enterprises lies Fata low, single-storey building facing the street with a ceramic workshop as its nearest neighbor.
Close to beach, marina and clover fields soccer fields, three miles from Christiansborg. Metro Station Lergravsparken is just around the corner and there are five minutes by train to King's Square.
Students have the key to the school and free access to classrooms and workshops throughout the day and therefore also required to keep the school locked outside school time.
Students will arrange the order and clean-up and is responsible for the violation and destruction of equipment and furniture.
The upper floor has a large classroom, with folding walls can be divided into three smaller rooms.
The computer room is the Mac Mini computers, scanner for negatives and slides and Canon A3 printers.
In the video rooms, there are dual G5 processors.
There are dark chamber with small pictures, medium format and 9x12 enlargers for black and white and color, movie room with film drying cabinets, cleaning room with drying machine and a clothes press with whole sheets, and two studies with Flash Engineering.
In the basement are also students' comfort and dining area and kitchen with cooker, assembly workshop with cutting machine, rest room and trophy room, decorated to a smoking room, the only place in school where smoking is permitted. The building's gable is a garden with tables and benches, dance floor, barbecue grill and a covered bar.
Website and Office
On Fatamorgana's homepage you find news, program, student's projects, articles about the school and the latest pictures and videorecordings. Gallery, news and on-line ordering of program, summerprogram and publications.
In the Log you can follow from week to week what is going on on the site and on the school. Her are the links to the sites that contain almost three thousand photographs.
All former students at Fatamorgana are offered their own homepage on Artist Catalogue, where they can post their addresses, resumes, and sample photographs. In the case someone searching for a photographer for a a specific project, they can log on to www.schoolartphoto.com and select from a list of qualified and competent photographers.
The best pictures are put on the homepage with comments, and The Gallery is constantly updated. If one is curious and would like to know which pictures have been opened and viewed in the course of a day, a week, a month, that information is available in Web Server Statistics. This site is updated at least once a week.
The Daily Maneger can be reached during office hours, 10-15 daily. Contact the daily maneger if you wish to request information about the school; a program, summer program, or want to purchase one of the school's publications. Or if you would like to visit the school, or schedule a brief interview before submitting your application.
If there is no one in the office during office hours, leave a message or send an e-mail and she will get back to you as soon as she can.
Fatamorgana Association and School Regulations
Fatamorgana, Denmark's School of Art Photography, is established under the Education Act to provide education in photography as art.
Fatamorgana has a yearly budget of 2 mill kroner. Of this DKK 400.000.- are a subsidy from Folkeoplysningssekretariatet of Copenhagen, the rest is tuition. Students attending or that have attended the school and current or past teachers can become members of the Fatamorgana Association.
Every year a representative is chosen among the students to sit on the board and at the yearly general assembly the remaining board members are nominated.
The current management consisted in 2012 of Bjørn Nørgaard, Tove Kurtzweil, Henrik Saxgren, Trine Søndergaard and Morten Bo as well as a student.
The School Regulations have been an integral part of its ideological concept and have been valid since its foundation in 1989:
- Motivation is a strong driving force. Only work, which has emerged from passion, is valuable.
- Commitment is responsibility and development is a requirement.
Praise and criticism are matters of course. Everyone can speak out and be receptive.
- Unconditional openness is the rule. Neither the professors nor the students conceal their dissatisfaction, covert envy, or knowledge of the craft.
- Everyone has the right to individual communication. Respect for the needs and privacy of the individual is high.
- The management of the school is founded on the students' rule. All practical matters are decided upon and implemented by the students.
- The school is open 24 hours a day. The students need to be able to work whenever they feel like but they are obliged to keep the school locked in off-hours.
- In case Fatamorgana's School Regulations are neglected in spite of repeated warnings, a student may be expelled by the school manager.
Application and Acceptance
An admissions committee composed of former and current pupils and the school leader put together in early June of the coming autumn and spring team and admit students for the one-year old photography education on the basis of applications submitted.
Qualified applicants not admitted to the Fall Team will be offered a place at the Spring Team.
In selecting candidates emphasis on the need for school. It is important for students going to evolve than if they are good at photography. Motivation and commitment outweighs skill and experience.
The candidate that shows temperament, attitude and sensitivity is chosen at the expense of the applicant who, in his pictures demonstrate how many photographic genres he mastered.
Application for admission must be made before 1 in June.
Some places will be reserved for new applicants who before 1 November candidates for admission.
If you want to become a student at the school must send the completed registration form together with a motivation for wanting to go to school and 10 copies in color or b / w, paper copies, slides or prints. Additional material documenting the applicant's academic level may be attached.
Students must be at school fyidt 18 years.
A condition for participation is that you are familiar with basic photographic techniques and camera control that can work independently in the darkroom or computer that you have worked seriously with photography and intend to train as a painter and documentary photographer.
A big commitment is a prerequisite.
Contact
Daglig Leder Trine Chrzan Olsen infofata.dk Director: Morten Bo www.mortenbo.com
Price:
Tuition fee for 4 month course (16 weeks) DKK 27.500.-
Tuition fee for one year (44 weeks) DKK 55.000.-
Unemployed living in the municipality of Copenhagen will receive a reduction on the tuition fee in accordance with current regulations.
Students who, at semester start, live outside the the city of Copenhagen must inform the school of their danish civil registration number.
Teaching and lectures are conducted in Danish. |
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