Photo Projects, Themes, and Bullshit
Photography, like most art, should evoke a reaction from its viewers. Better yet, it should say something, reveal something, or convey something: a story, an underlying truth, a complex emotional reaction. At the very least it should be visually compelling. While one-off single photos can have this impact, it’s always seemed to me that photography with the most impact often achieves this through projects carried out over time.
Frankly, I struggle to conjure up projects, to ideate and execute on a predetermined subject. I just take a camera with me pretty much everywhere I go and take pictures of scenes that unfold in front of me. And sometimes I’m lucky enough to be able to make time to hit the streets with the sole purpose of taking pictures. And sometimes I’m lucky enough to get a few worthwhile single images out of it. That’s pretty much it.
I aspire to something greater, to project work, but one-off single photos are generally my jam. As much as love photography, I sometimes wonder if I’m just not inspired enough, or thoughtful enough to think in terms of projects. Or maybe it’s just situational due to my life and schedule. I simply get it in where and when I can, and while that’s enough to generate work and keep me mostly satisfied, it’s certainly not conducive to project work.
There are, however, things that always attract my eye, which I guess could be arranged into loosely themed projects. The galleries on my website are separated into two groups: Spaces and Places, comprised of travel photos, mostly street scenes and architecture, from various international locales; and Ongoing Observations, collections of photos grouped by the themes of architecture, scapes (land, city, etc.), streets, and people looking at art (thanks and apologies to Elliot Erwitt). But I’m not sure any of it is compelling as projects, per se, beyond the basic categorization. (And the Ongoing Observations galleries are in desperate need of an update.)
But hey, this is art, so I guess I could call anything a project, though I worry about the pitfall of being a little too loose with that “anything is a project” creative license. I’ve watched YouTube videos and read interviews with known or notable contemporary street photographers who have referred to the streets they stalk as projects, and I think that’s bullshit. The corner of Fourth and Market in downtown San Francisco is not a project; 48th between 6th and 8th in Manhattan is not a project — those are just places where lots of people congregate or pass through, so they’re target rich environments.
When I think of projects, I think of collections of images that have a threaded theme, a structure, they’re making statement or revealing something deeper about the subject on its face, and they capture images over lengths of time. Magnum offers tips for long term projects, which pretty nicely sum it all up.
The scope can be broad and location based, like Jake Ricker’s multi-years-long study of the Golden Gate Bridge, which is a powerful look at an iconic location where people come to do all kinds of weird things (including die). Or it can make a powerful sociopolitical statement like exiled Russian photographer and Ukraine war dissident Danila Tkachenko, who’s traveling to European tourist designations and photographing Ukrainian refuges in front of images of their destroyed homeland. But projects don’t have to be so grand — a friend of mine has spent the last couple of years taking Polaroid portraits of people in her neighborhood community in SF, which seems like a pretty good project.
The idea of projects has been on my mind lately because I recently started trying to dedicate some time to digging through my Lightroom library and tagging photos with key terms in an attempt to tease out collections of images by theme. Ultimately, I’d like to find themed groups of images that might be suitable for photo zines, or cues of where I should dig deeper, subject-wise.
It’s tedious work, which is entirely my fault. I should have been doing this for every image I added to the library as they were added; there are over 15 thousand untagged photos in there now (some can definitely be deleted). But maybe I’ll discover a nascent project or two along the way. Until I strike gold, I’m just telling myself that sifting through all this bullshit is worth it regardless of what comes out of it. And I know it is.
In the meantime, here’s a set of black and white film photos — Kodak Tri-X 400 and T-Max 400, processed and scanned at home — that I snapped with a Rollei 35S, or an Olympus XA, or a Leica MP as I went about my days over the last few months.
