Photography Educator: Lindsay Metivier – LENSCRATCH

©Lindsay Metivier

Photography Educator is a month-to-month collection on Lenscratch. Once a month, we have a good time a devoted pictures trainer by sharing their insights, methods and excellence in inspiring college students of all ages. These educators play a transformative function in scholar growth, appearing as mentors and guides who create environments the place college students really feel valued and supported, fostering confidence and resilience.

For February, I’m delighted to function the work of artist and educator Lindsay Metivier. I’ve a deep appreciation for Lindsay’s work as an artist, how she sees the world and interprets it via the digicam. Her images learn like poems with a sideways look, revealing the on a regular basis in spectacular shade. I lately found Lindsay’s deep affect and accomplishments as an educator. She cultivates her college students’ curiosity, broadens their views, and encourages them to have interaction the world with honesty. Her instructing observe displays the identical attentiveness present in her artwork, fostering a classroom surroundings rooted in exploration and artistic dialogue. In this text, you’ll discover choices from a few of Lindsay’s tasks, together with images and testimonials from her college students, and her ideas on her evolving observe as each an artist and educator. Enjoy.

Slow seeing. Re-seeing. A quiet insistence that that means can stay within the refined shift in what you missed the primary time. Or the fifth.

My work reads like a diary of sleepless weeks. Filled with observations recorded within the crepuscular half mild bridging darkness and daybreak it evokes that hovering state; the place reminiscence isn’t reminiscence a lot because the mind seeing its personal contents within the second. These are the hours when firm is scarce, restricted primarily to deer, very like these photos, their consciousness repeatedly flickering and liminal. 

©Lindsay Metivier, Pool Cups from the collection “Almost No Memory”, 2016

ES: How did you get into instructing pictures?
LM: I grew up in and round Burlington, Vermont. I’m unsure that the situation influenced my profession path however the lively native music and humanities scene paired with my highschool artwork lecturers mentorship helped me to totally immerse myself in my passions, assembly and fascinating with a group who taught me that artwork making is a potential profession/life path. One trainer particularly confirmed me care and consideration that was so significant to me in highschool after my father handed away. I at all times try to make college students really feel the best way that Julian Bradshaw made me really feel.
ES: What retains you engaged as an educator?
LM: My college students maintain me challenged and engaged as an educator. They are inspiring. They ask direct and typically uncomfortable questions, and they’re fast to sense when one thing feels unresolved. It requires me to remain open and engaged with pictures as a dwelling observe.
ES: How do you join along with your college students?
LM: I’m open with my college students. Some would possibly say I’m a power oversharer however I imagine that being actual with individuals exhibits them that it’s protected to be actual with you. We do check-ins firstly of sophistication, we go round and every scholar has a minute to share about their day or about their work. This is a means for me to attach with them but additionally for them to attach with each other.
I attempt to perceive the place college students are coming from relatively than imposing a single definition of success. I’m open about my very own questions and struggles, which helps create an area the place college students really feel snug taking dangers and speaking about them.
ES: How do you encourage curiosity and the artistic course of in your courses?
LM: I usually work with few constraints. By limiting sure technical selections, college students can focus extra absolutely on concepts and statement. Many assignments contain repetition, length, or returning to the identical topic over time. I need college students to expertise pictures as a mind-set, dwelling and respiratory, relatively than a method of manufacturing photos shortly.

©Lindsay Metivier, Car Wash from the collection “Home Range”, 2018

©Lindsay Metivier, Cemetery Deer from the collection “Home Range”

©Lindsay Metivier, In Fidelity Court, 2021

ES: What profession accomplishments really feel most significant to you?
LM: I are inclined to assume much less about particular person achievements and extra about sustained influence. Seeing college students proceed to make work, take dangers, and belief their concepts over time feels significant. I’m additionally pleased with constructing areas, each academic and curatorial, that assist considerate and difficult work. I opened my first artwork area, Aviary, in Boston after I was 25. 10 years later I opened Peel Gallery + Photo Lab in Carrboro, North Carolina.
ES: How do you combine your expertise as a working artist into your instructing?
LM: I’m clear about what it means to maintain a artistic observe. That consists of uncertainty, rejection, gradual durations or durations of means an excessive amount of occurring directly. I carry these realities into critiques and discussions so college students can perceive pictures as a lifestyle.
My college students go to my enterprise and usually have loads of questions, as do I, about how the place pays its personal lease (it doesn’t but).
ES: Where do you discover inspiration?
LM: Since 2007 I’ve been buying an artwork e book each month. It started as a New Year’s decision to ensure to immerse myself in new artists and artworks that weren’t simply individuals I’d stumbled upon on photograph blogs (and ultimately social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook).  Some artists, writers and filmmakers who’ve impacted my images and the best way I see images embody Wolfgang Tillmans, Lydia Davis, David Lynch, Penelope Umbrico, Susan Hiller, William Eggleston and Molly Nilsson.

©Lindsay Metivier, Food Wall Friday, 2016

©Lindsay Metivier, Another Day from the collection “Field Recordings”, 2025

©Lindsay Metivier, OCSC 10122025

©Lindsay Metivier, Orange Peel, 2024

©Lindsay Metivier, Carrboro Peels #43 for the collection “Almost No Memory”, 2024

©Lindsay Metivier

©Lindsay Metivier, Cat Mouth from the collection “Almost No Memory”, 2025

©Lindsay Metivier

©Lindsay Metivier, Selections from the collection “The Corner”, Installation of Polaroids, 2025

ES: What challenges do you face as a trainer within the arts?
LM: One problem helps college students navigate exterior pressures whereas nonetheless defending their artistic instincts. Another is realizing when to information and when to step again so college students can arrive at their very own conclusions. A 3rd problem is job uncertainty.  With the world being as scary as it’s proper now, Arts departments are shedding funding on a regular basis. Adjuncting was exhausting earlier than this and it’s additional exhausting now.
ES: What is your imaginative and prescient for the way forward for pictures training?
LM: I hope pictures training continues to prioritize important considering, visible literacy, and moral consciousness. Tools and platforms will proceed to alter. The skill to assume clearly and responsibly with photos will stay important.
ES: What recommendation do you give to pictures college students?
LM: Make work that feels essential to you earlier than fascinated by an viewers. Look at work outdoors of pictures. Watch something by David Lynch. Allow your self time to maneuver slowly and to query your assumptions. Revisit. Go see artwork in your communities. Adopt a canine from a rescue or shelter (that is recommendation I give everybody however possibly don’t hearken to me I’ve 5 canines, a cat, a tortoise, two birds and loads of fish).

Thank you Lindsay. Your college students are very fortunate to have you ever as a trainer.

STUDENT WORK

©Antonio Bailey, Contortion

©Antonio Bailey, Mirrors

©Antonio Bailey, Plating

©Antonio Bailey, Smokes

Antonio Bailey
I had the pleasure to work with Lindsay Metivier throughout my BFA diploma at UNC-Greensboro and at her gallery, Peel. Lindsay shortly grew to become a mentor to me, and her instructing strategies modified the best way I checked out pictures, encouraging me to push my artistic boundaries. Inside her classroom she gave every of us the eye and encouragement we wanted to make our photographs come to life. One lesson I realized from Lindsay was throughout a bunch critique that I now use in my classroom. Her heat and vigorous temper melted away our worries and allowed us to open up about our desires and needs with picture making. So now in my classroom, I permit my college students to be themselves, to really feel welcomed and thru that they may really feel extra snug sharing their objectives of pictures.
Instagram:@antonioxbailey
Website: www.antoniobailey.com

©Qiaoan Joseph Gu

©Qiaoan Joseph Gu

©Qiaoan Joseph Gu

©Qiaoan Joseph Gu

Qiaoan “Joseph” Gu
Lindsay Metivier was my darkroom and digital pictures teacher for practically all the photograph courses I took at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as an undergraduate. Lindsay was some of the widespread instructors amongst artwork and non-art majors. Her courses had been at all times vigorous, genuine, and full of the sharing of everybody’s experiences. Not solely are her courses a pleasing expertise, Lindsay offers her college students an enormous set of data and pushes college students simply the correct quantity to attain extra. During her courses, we might usually have subject journeys to Duke University’s Nasher Museum and her gallery and photograph lab (Peel Gallery + Photo Lab) in downtown Carrboro, NC, the place I later did an internship there. During the internship, she was very affected person and prepared to collaborate with all of us on planning or creating new methods/methods to satisfy particular photograph lab orders. It is inspiring to see the resourcefulness of her working at her personal gallery.

Lindsay Metivier strives to assist all her college students out and in of the classroom. I really feel like I may at all times share my new works or concepts along with her, even lengthy after commencement, and she or he would respect the sharing and supply constructive suggestions.
Instagram: @joseph_photo_stash

About Lindsay
Lindsay Metivier is a photographer, an educator, a curator, and a gallerist primarily based in Carrboro, North Carolina.  She holds a BFA in each Photography and Art Education from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and an MFA in Studio Art from UNC Chapel Hill. From 2011 to 2021, she was the proprietor of Aviary Gallery, an exhibition area and photograph lab positioned in Boston, Massachusetts. In 2020, Lindsay opened an artwork area referred to as Peel Gallery + Photo Lab in Carrboro, North Carolina. Her work has been exhibited extensively, most lately on the Hillsborough Arts Council Gallery,  LUMP gallery, Oneoneone Gallery, The Nasher Museum at Duke University, The Ackland Art Museum at UNC Chapel Hill, The John and June Allcott Gallery, The Front Gallery, and Transmitter. Her work has been featured on The Heavy Collective, Humble Arts Foundation, and A New Nothing. Her work  has been featured on the duvet of Oxford American Magazine and in Chapel Hill Magazine and Chatham Magazine.

Websites: www.lindsaymetivier.com, www.peel.gallery
IG @lindsaymetivier