Chico Review
Photography can be a pretty solitary pursuit. You sometimes mentally immerse yourself in a project and often think about little else for weeks or months at a time, punctuated only by your children, your family, and the occasional reminder that the outside world still exists. Eventually your creative process can end up in a bit of a loop. You become so close to the work that objectivity quietly disappears, and editing or sequencing becomes almost impossible. You’re no longer seeing the work, you’re just living inside it and driving yourself slightly mad in the process.
After two years and counting on my Buzkashi project, I felt I needed some exterior insight. Not reassurance, but real, honest, outside eyes. So I applied for the Chico Review, a premier photo book retreat held once a year over a week at Chico Hot Springs Resort in Montana. This year, 80 photographers from around the world were accepted to spend the week alongside some of the most respected photographers, bookmakers, gallerists, and curators working in contemporary photography today.
The structure is straightforward. Every participant gets 10 formal portfolio reviews spread throughout the week, each 20 minutes long. There are two guest lectures every morning from people who have genuinely shaped photography and photographers for years. Each day closes with happy hour and hot springs, which, I’ll be honest, isn’t the worst way to process a day’s worth of feedback. You sit down for dinner and find yourself next to a couple of Magnum photographers, a gallerist, and a publisher, all of whom are as happy to talk shop over a beer as they are to quietly dismantle your edit. In between lectures and reviews, participants and reviewers spill out across the lawn and talk almost entirely about photography. No small talk required.
The formal reviews were where a lot shifted for me. Hearing the same instinct reflected back across ten different conversations with ten different perspectives starts to clarify things you’d been circling for months. Sometimes it confirms what you already suspected but hadn’t been brave enough to commit to. Sometimes it flatly contradicts how you were thinking and turns out to be right. I had reviews with a couple of photographers whose work differs wildly from my own, unsure what insight the reviews would realistically provide. Only to be blown away by some of their thoughts and come away looking at things from an entirely fresh perspective.
To spend an entire week living and breathing photography, tucked away at the end of a valley in Montana with mountains behind you and wide open plains stretching out in front, is something else. What had been a solitary pursuit suddenly became a shared one. You find yourself looking at your own work in completely new ways, partly from the feedback and partly just from being around people who care about it as deeply as you do. And somewhere along the way you make a few friends for life.
It’s a genuinely brilliant experience and I’d recommend it without hesitation to anyone who’s ever caught themselves staring at their own work and wondering if they’ve completely lost the plot.
https://toddantony.com/portfolios/personal/
