I’m now available to work with you

Current and former students, fellow faculty and friends surprised me with a Zoom gathering on my last day of teaching at Syracuse University. Now I’m ready to work with you.

I am back to working with photographers directly, full time. Let’s work together.

Friday, May 21 marked my last day as director of The Alexia Grants and as an endowed professor at Syracuse University, where I’ve been teaching visual storytelling and project development courses for nine years.

What a rich time it has been. I learned so much while crafting courses from scratch and further developing a visual language as a way to explain this craft of producing visually powerful work. 

The focus has been to help people understand how to approach projects that are unique to their special abilities and interests and achieve a professional level of work. The goal has been to help every student get an A grade for their projects and that has been largely the case the past three years.

Students in the courses I’ve taught won awards in an immense range of competitions, grants and fellowships, including more still photo awards than any other school as well as first and second place photographer of the year in College Photographer of the Year competition two years ago. In all, I’ve edited the submissions of magazine photographers of the year, newspaper photographers of the year first and second places three times and those who worked for me were awarded picture editor of the year three times.

During the past nine years I also continued to work with professional photographers – 20 to 30  a year – to help them fully realize their projects, including editing 23 photo books, many contest and grant submissions and offering comprehensive guidance.

Now I’m returning full time to work directly with people who make photographs. I’ll be describing ways to work with me more completely in the coming days - I am going to take a short break. For now, here are a few ways we can work together:

• Work on a project from inception to completion, going from idea to proposal, coverage plan, edit your photos as the project progresses, create a set of edits and pitches. This would be the richest experience.

• Assess your current approach to producing work and advise you about ways to improve your craft. This is more than just a review, it’s a more complete look at your work, identifying what makes your approach successful and speaking to ways to make more of your work successful.

• Create sequenced selections - edits - of an existing project that is either complete or in progress. Edits can suit various outcomes.

• Help you apply for a grant. After evaluating close to 3,000 Alexia grant submissions and seeing how 8 years of judging panels respond to them, I have a strong sense of what works, and what doesn’t. We can select and sequence your strongest work and I’ll help you craft a written proposal that’s more likely to get a positive response.

• Help you prepare your work for competitions and reviews. I’ve also been a judge and reviewer in a variety of settings the past eight years.

Each of these includes advice on how to improve what you’re doing based on a process that I’ve been developing for many years and am writing a book that fully expresses this approach. I’ll also develop learning experiences based on the book once it is complete.

Write me at m@michaelddavis.com if you’re interested in working together. I’ll look forward to hearing from you.

I’ll also be writing in this space regularly. Stay tuned.