Words and Images: The Art of Creative Fusion Workshop with Manuela Thames
DATE
Tuesdays & Fridays, September 8-25, 2026
Noon - 2 pm Eastern
LOCATION
Zoom
EVENT ORGANIZER
SE Center for Photography
This is a 6 day Zoom Workshop,
We are all familiar with the saying, “A picture says more than a thousand words.” While this sentiment holds a lot of truth, this new online workshop invites you to explore how writing can deepen, expand, and clarify your photographic work. Led by photographic artist Manuela Thames, this six-session course creates time and space to investigate the dynamic relationship between words and images, and how writing can become an active tool within your creative practice.
Through a series of guided prompts and assignments, including journaling, mind mapping, and creating your own erasure poetry, you experiment with different ways of combining text and image. Each session includes time for group discussion and student work review, offering space to share progress, reflect on ideas, and receive feedback. You use writing to generate ideas, clarify intent, and uncover new ways of thinking about your photographs. Rather than treating writing as an add-on, the workshop encourages you to use language as a generative process that informs how you see, sequence, and understand your work.
You also spend time looking at and discussing photo books and fine-art projects by artists who work across both mediums, paying close attention to how text functions alongside images. These discussions offer insight into how photographers and writers use language to shape meaning, rhythm, narrative, and emotional resonance.
By the end of the workshop, you leave with practical strategies for integrating writing into your creative process, a deeper understanding of how text and image can work together, and new tools for expanding and articulating your artistic expression.
Manuela Thames
Manuela Thames is a photographic artist based in Saint Paul, Minnesota where she lives with her husband and two children. Born and raised in Germany, she moved to the US in 2004 after marrying her American husband. Shortly thereafter she began her photography journey after two life changing events happened within one year, the birth of her first son and the death of her brother.
Largely self-taught, Manuela uses various photographic techniques to explore themes around loss and grief, her personal experience with generational trauma, as well as the notions of belonging, connection and what it means to be human. Within that she continues to explore human ways of coping, the strength that evolves out of suffering and our common desire for healing and journey towards wholeness. Much of her work consists of black and white, conceptual self-portraits.
Manuela’s photography has been described as contemplative, evocative, dark, and cinematic and has been widely exhibited nationally as well as internationally. Her “Trauma” series won 1st place conceptual series of the year in the Monovisions Award in 2019, and in the same year she won the 13th Julia Margaret Cameron Award in the Self-Portrait Category. In addition, her work has been published online and in print in such places as Black and White Magazine, Sun Magazine, Dohdo Magazine and Shots Magazine.
Workshop limited to 12 attendees.
Refunds up to 30 days before event.
This event is organized by
SE CENTER FOR PHOTOGRAPHY
Our workshops and expeditions cover all aspects of photography and challenge, encourage and inspire the photographer in all of us. During the workshops, our complete focus is on you, the photographer.
Our instructors are working professional photographers who have a passion for sharing and inspiring. We recognize the commitment of time, energy and money it takes for you to attend a workshop and work very hard to be the best at intimately knowing our locations, providing a wealth of high quality information via excellent presentations and one on one help in the field, presenting extremely supportive and highly detailed image reviews, and doing all of this in an energy rich, supportive environment where inspiration and having fun are the hallmark of our workshops.
SE Center Workshops fully realizes that in addition to the education business we are in the inspiration business, and ultimately, we are a service business. We are here to serve you and your complete satisfaction with your workshop experience is our pledge. After all, the majority of our workshop participants are repeat customers and we know as well as anyone that we only get one chance to make a memorable first impression.
When we publish a workshop cost it includes everything. We won't surprise you with additional Materials Costs or Model Fees. If the workshop is all day at the SE Center, we provide lunch, snacks and beverages. Before you register you know the true cost of our workshops.
Words and Images: The Art of Creative Fusion Workshop with Manuela Thames, via Zoom and the SE Center for Photography
104 S Main St, Greenville, SC 29601
SE Center Members $325 All Others $395
