Off the Map: Building a Photography Career From Anywhere

Olivia brings her love of analog process outdoors for a cyanotype workshop built around sunlight instead of a darkroom. Drawing on her years of making large-scale cyanotypes alongside editorial and advertising work for clients like Hermès, Nike, and Levi's, she walks participants through digital negatives, photograms, and the Anna Atkins tradition of printing with plant matter, with the paper developing in real time.

Discovered on Flickr as a teenager, shooting Converse by 15, the cover of the New York Times at 17, and campaigns for Nike all over the world before she could legally drink, Olivia Bee has since traded a nonstop commercial travel schedule for a farm in southern Oregon, where she raises grass-fed beef and pasture-raised poultry between shoots. This talk is an honest look at the constant negotiation between art and commerce, the value of building a perspective far outside New York, LA, or Paris, and what it takes to stay rooted while still making work for clients like Adidas, Vogue, and the New York Times Magazine.

Olivia transforms an entire room into a giant pinhole camera, projecting the world outside upside down and backwards onto the wall. Attendees can step inside, sit for portraits, wear costumes, or capture the projected image on cyanotype paper, experiencing in real time the optical trick at the heart of every photograph.