“Every photograph holds more than a memory. It holds a conversation between the past and the present.”
Yanina Shevchenko is a visual artist, photographer, and therapeutic photography practitioner based near Barcelona. She holds an MA in Photography and Urban Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a Postgraduate Certificate in Therapeutic Photography from Robert Gordon University.
Through workshops, exhibitions, retreats, and community projects, she explores memory, identity, family narratives, and belonging. Her work combines photography, archives, creative writing, and handmade processes to help people engage with images in thoughtful and meaningful ways. Her artistic work has been exhibited and published internationally.
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Personal website: www.yaninashevchenko.com
In this workshop, I invite participants to explore storytelling and journaling through found photographs — images with unknown pasts, open meanings, and plenty of space for imagination. Found photographs are generous. Because we don’t know who the people are or what really happened, the image becomes a playground. We fill the gaps. We invent. We project. We recognise something of ourselves where no proof exists. This is where journaling becomes fun, surprising, and strangely revealing. Together, we’ll explore how the same photograph can generate completely different stories depending on who is looking. One person sees tenderness, another senses tension. One writes a love story, another a quiet ending. Through playful writing prompts, the participants will be invited to step behind the camera, hover just outside the frame, or imagine what happened a moment before or after the image was taken. They will experiment with shifting perspectives, changing emotional tones, and letting intuition lead the pen. This is not a photography workshop and not an image analysis session. There is no interpretation of symbols and no need to share personal history. The emphasis is on writing, curiosity, and play, using images as a starting point rather than a subject to explain. Participants leave with fresh journaling tools and a clearer sense of how the stories they tell about images are connected to the stories they tell about life.
Date: TBD
Time: TBD