Stuart Schwartz, photographer and founder of “The Image Flow”, a photography learning center and gallery in Mill Valley California, along with photographer Jeff Zaruba, brought a group of photography students to La Romita in 2017 to spend ten days combining these two arts in the most tantalizing ways.
To help us we enlisted the support of a longtime La Romita friend and collaborator, Alberto Montebello, head of “Slow Food” in Umbria. Alberto himself gave a lecture and demonstration of traditional pasta-making and preparation of pasta dishes, while his son Sergio Montebello gave demos on making sausages and salumi. The photographers experienced something new each day, sampling the objects of their studies, and getting to know true friends of the earth: the farmers and fishers and shepherds and chefs.
We are planning a new workshop for 2022 with Stuart and Jeff.
Stuart Schwartz specializes in people photography for advertising and corporate clients and spent many years living and working in Europe. During the workshop, I witnessed his amazing skill at communicating with his subjects, gently allowing them to feel comfortable in front of the lens, while simultaneously communicating to his students the techniques necessary to get the shot. While some of the scenes of the students and subjects often looked like paparazzi events, the subjects were always made to feel like a part of something good, actually becoming invested in the shoots.
Jeff Zaruba is a professional travel photographer who has worked on five continents, forty countries and all fifty states. He finds amazing patterns and moods in architectural and geometric subjects. The two are longtime friends and complement each other across the spectrum of photographic possibilities.
All of the photos on this page were taken by Stuart during the 2017 workshop.
If you’re interested in finding out about Stuart and Jeff’s next workshop, you can leave your info with us on our Future Workshop information sign-up page
