Instructor Bios

Margo Taussig Pinkerton, aka The Barefoot Contessa (or TBC), got her first camera at age eight and has been photographing and traveling with a passion ever since. BTW, the Taussig in her name is Bohemian (literally) and is pronounced TOW-sig, Tau to rhyme with cow.

Why the moniker "The Barefoot Contessa"? Back in 1970, a good friend who loved the way Margo always entertained, giving elegant dinner parties in a long skirt, her then-dark hair down her back, and bare feet, said she reminded him of Ava Gardner in the 1954 movie by the same name. The moniker stuck. As an aside for those who confuse the two of us, the cook bought a specialty food store called Barefoot Contessa in 1978. There is certainly room for both of us.

Pinkerton started out as a location and stock photographer for major editorial, travel, outdoor, advertising, and corporate clients in the early 80s, has given numerous workshops, seminars, and photography-school lectures, and has led many photo adventures. TBC even led wilderness adventures north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska canoeing down National Wild and Scenic Rivers.

Her work has appeared in a plethora of calendars, coffee-table books, and magazines worldwide, including, among others, GEO, National Geographic Traveler, Vogue, The Wine Spectator, Yankee and Caribbean Travel & Life. In addition, over the decades, she has had dozens of solo exhibitions, more recently with her late husband (see Arnie Zann below), as well as been juried into many group shows. She and Arnie published NEW ORLEANS through Brilliant Graphics in Pennsylvania that has produced many books by notable photographers. They were delighted to be accepted by Brilliant.

Margo's mother was a very accomplished artist, having been juried into The Copley Society of Boston (now The Copley Society of Art,) the oldest, non-profit art association in the United States, with a history dating back to 1879. Growing up in a multi-generational, artistic family that exposed Margo to the great museums and painters of the world has given her a unique insight into composition, color, texture, and the quality of light. The energy and passion for photography that she brings to the workshops are infectious.

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Her late husband and partner, Arnold "Arnie" Zann, started his career in his early 20s photographing for the Chicago American, a large afternoon daily, covering civil rights, politics, and other social issues.

Soon thereafter, and while still working for the newspaper, he started working for LIFE and Time and has been published in almost every major magazine in the world, including National Geographic, Paris Match, GEO, Fortune, New York Times Sunday Magazine, and others.

He, too, gave many workshops and seminars throughout his long career traveling the world for editorial and Fortune 100 and 500 clients. In fact, earlier in his career, he was listed as one of the top ten corporate photographers in America. Arnie's knowledge of the zone system and dramatic lighting brought strength to his photographs. He always had an uncanny eye for what photographs would become effective black and whites, his first love in photography.

In addition to their broad range of assignment work, both Margo and Arnie shot extensively for stock images that appeared in advertising, corporate, and editorial venues. Their fine art photography has won numerous awards over the years and is in many private, museum, and library collections, including in part George Eastman House (Rochester, NY), Currier Museum of Art (Manchester, NH), Contemporary Museum of Photograpphy (Chicago, IL), and Beinecke Library Digital Collections (Yale University, New Haven, CT).

Their passion was always making strong, compelling images wherever they travelled, whether on assignment or for fine art, worldwide or locally.

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When Pinkerton and Zann joined lives and businesses in the 90s, they continued their love of teaching and sharing a lifetime of experiences with their participants. As noted above, Margo led wilderness adventures. Her clients wanted to return with the best photos they could to celebrate what for most of them would be a once-in-a-lifetime trip of that nature. That was the beginning of Barefoot Contessa Adventures that ran for many years until Margo and her late husband morphed that into Barefoot Contessa Photo Adventures in the 90s. Arnie and Margo shared a similar approach to making compelling photographs as well as in how they would take Barefoot Contessa Adventures forward and morph it into Barefoot Contessa Photo Adventures.

They agreed that their participants would always come first, that the fun factor was critical to learning, that non-photographing "spousal units" would always be welcome, and that their "students" would go home with tools to continue to grow as photography artists.

Now that Arnie is gone, Margo is continuing what she started back in the early 80s and what she and Arnie built together over the years. BCPA brings the same discipline of film days to the digital photography era. The principles remain the same, and Margo still encourages BCPA location or online participants to think in terms of fine art photography, using creativity, thinking outside of the box, and basic principles of art to bring meaning to their images.

As Margo has said for many years, even before meeting Arnie, "I cannot not do photography."

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