Hold Forth Photography
Berlin Stockholm
We, hannah goldstein & Maria Sandgren, have created an online course platform called Hold Forth Photography for anyone with a camera and a keen interest in art photography.
Hold Forth Photography aims to offer aesthetic breaks and inspiration for photographers.
We will be hosting workshops, courses, and seminars – entirely online – where we can meet and develop our photographic practice.
You are welcome to read more, see below, about the upcoming Winter Course 2025-26 on the theme of Relationships. We also write about Hold Forth Photography, and the connection between photography and psychology.
Feel free to visit us on Instagram #holdforthphotograpy
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We write about photography, creativity, and psychology, particularly in the context of photography that focuses on relationships and the lifespan.
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Up-coming!
The Winter course 2025-26
Please note that this course will be held in Swedish language!
The Winter Course begins in October 2025 and concludes in March 2026. We will focus on discussing the participants' images and exploring their artistic practices.
We have chosen the theme of Relationships for the visual world as our focus, and by relationships, we mean in a broad sense, such as between people or between people and society.
Between the image discussions, participants will be given a digital kit containing videos, texts, and other materials on photographic practice and psychology.
The course offers you the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of your images and refine your aesthetic vision and practice.
The Winter Course 2025-26
Photo discussion
The photo discussions take place once a month, for a total of six sessions, starting in October. Participants select their images for discussion.
We also examine how other photographers have portrayed relationships based on various types of dynamics, emotions, and moods. We discuss how aesthetic qualities enhance and detract from different impressions.
We envision the photo discussions as an aesthetic break and source of inspiration, where participants can express themselves and learn from one another.
By the end of the course, all participants will have been enriched with aesthetic knowledge and psychology about photographic practice.
Theme: relationships
The theme is relationships in photos. Many photographers depict relationships in their images. This may involve portraying certain individuals in specific settings, but it can also be about the relationship between the photographer and the people in the picture. Self-portraits are also a tradition.
Images are also created at a specific point in time (event) and in a particular era. These points in time also have something to do with the photographer's life. What the images reveal about relationships can rarely be separated from their context.
The history of photography provides a wealth of material on relationships that can inspire us both thematically and aesthetically.
Course design
We will meet for online photo discussions on Wednesdays, starting on 8 October and continuing on the first Wednesday of every month (except January). The course will end in March 2026. Hannah and Maria will participate in all photo discussions.
Between each photo discussion, participants will have access to a digital kit containing videos and texts about photographic practice, photographers, creativity, and psychology based on the theme of relationships and the life cycle. Short reflection exercises are included to inspire the creative mind and practice.
The kit is designed to keep the creative thread open and alive between image discussion sessions.
On Photography, Creativity, and Psychology
As artistic photographers, we don't just work with light and shadow, composition and color – we work with the very essence of human perception and emotional response.
When a person looks at a photograph, a complex psychological process takes place. The brain doesn't just process visual information – it activates memories, emotions, and associations in milliseconds.
While technical knowledge provides us with the tools, aesthetic psychology offers us the map of the human mind.
Aesthetic psychology also sheds light on our creative process. By understanding how inspiration arises, how intuition works, and which psychological states foster creativity, we can create more favorable conditions for our artistic endeavors.
We can learn to understand better how different environments influence our creativity, how emotional states impact our visual perception, and how we can utilize awareness to deepen our artistic vision.
This does not mean rationalizing away the mystery of art but rather deepening our understanding of how this mystery works – both in ourselves as creators and in those who encounter our images.
hannah
goldstein
Homepage (English): hannah goldstein artist
Workshops (Swedish): Berlin workshops
Instagram: #koljagoldstein, Hold Forth Photography
hannah Goldstein is a multidisciplinary artist who works with photography, collage and video. She lives and works in Berlin. Her work is primarily rooted in feminist theories and stories about forgotten women. Other themes include archives, storytelling and questioning the power of images. She has exhibited internationally for more than 15 years. Her work is included in the Moderna Museet collection, and she has also received several scholarships and awards. Hannah has been teaching photography in Germany and Sweden since 2009.
hannah has a BA in Photography and Human Rights from Bard College, New York. She was a one-year resident at the Royal University College of Fine Arts, Stockholm, and participated in a master class with Arno Fischer at Ostkreuz Schule für Fotografie, Berlin. She also has a Master's degree in Art Education from the Peit Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.
Maria
Sandgren
Homepage (English): Maria Sandgren Photographer
Instagram (Swedish): #mariasandgren_studio, Hold Forth Photography
Blog (Swedish): Maria Sandgren Studio
Maria Sandgren is a photographer, educator, licensed psychologist, and PhD in psychology. She lives and works in Stockholm.
Her series Circles of Care was exhibited at Hasselblad Fotosalong 2025. The images are also published in the photo book En ovikt samling (2024), in which she works with images and text. She draws on a research-based practice in photography and text, seeking to portray emotions, care and interpersonal relationships.
She is self-taught in photography and has taken courses in photographic processes at Gamleby Folkhögskola, as well as in theoretical and practical photography at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. She has worked as a lecturer in psychology and researched music and political psychology. Maria created the first course on the psychology of creativity at a university in Sweden.
For her, photography serves as a channel for freely expressing emotions and developing a deeper understanding of what it means to be human. She occasionally writes photography, creativity, and psychology on her blog. She also works in training and education, as well as in private psychology.