Seeing A Union is a photography workshop that was conceived as a response to one of photography’s most persistent barriers: the assumption that the medium belongs to those with equipment, training, and access. Facilitated by Ifeanyi Wisdom of Prime1Creations, the workshop opened its doors with no prerequisites, no prior knowledge, no camera required.

The curriculum drew deliberately from the tradition of Nigerian wedding photography; a hybrid visual practice that blends portraiture, fashion, documentary, and event photography into a single language. This approach was developed based on TABB’s commitment to grounding the workshop in Black cultural aesthetics rather than defaulting to a Eurocentric photographic canon.

The workshop moved past aesthetic portraits. It centered weddings as a socio-cultural practice. Who is permitted to marry? Who is left outside of the frame? In what forms can marriage exist beyond dominant prescriptions?

In Seeing a Union, we turned the camera toward married parties whose unions fall outside of the norm. Relationships that disrupt, expand, and challenge normative scripts. It involved reimagining how love and commitment are visually archived.

At its core, the project asks: Can learning itself become a form of meaning-making? This workshop is an experiment in that direction. It combines technique with the process of seeing, questioning, and recording the multiplicity of unions that exist in our Society.

The first two weekends covered fundamentals: composition, light design, and the principles of digital storytelling. The final two weekends moved into live production: real couples, studio and outdoor settings, peer critique, and portfolio development. The workshop report noted a strong demand for more photography programming.