Working on projects

Ann Arbor, MI. 2001. Kodak HIE film. I so loved that film.

The longer you are creative in any endeavor, the more wisdom (maybe) you accumulate. In photography, you not only gain experience, but you also accumulate a body of work, which is more than just stacks of negatives and prints (or hard drives full of files).  Your interests may change over the years - what was once a driving force for your type of photography may have petered out, and maybe you veered into a different direction altogether.  Or maybe, if you are like me, you have had many interests, and there is no single subject of your photography, but many.  For example, I’ve had a thing for photographing post offices, especially those in small towns, or places with odd names. But that does not make me a chronicler of post offices.  However, I have a lot of photographs of them.  In my travels, I often photograph every-day mundane things like those ice boxes outside of gas stations, or one of the few remaining pay phones, or oddball signs, or whatever catches my eye.  On their own, each photograph may not amount to much.  However, after a few decades, these accumulations start to have some weight to them.  As Garry Winogrand said, “everything is photographable.”  And to that, I agree.  I’ve photographed a lot over the past 25+ years, and some of those photographs are better than others.  Some have been exhibited. Some have appeared in publications, and quite a few have been in my photozines.  I have had some exhibitions that were based on a preconceived project - that is, I photographed purposefully for a particular goal.  A few of my zines were also produced in that fashion - a means to an end. The zine on Kudzu was exactly that.  It’s not that I had a trove of Kudzu photographs to choose from and thought “I ought to put these together for a zine.”  In that case, I had a clear goal, and in the space of a few months, made the photographs for it.  I also invited other photographers I knew to participate, so it wasn’t an open-ended project.

However, sometimes there are enough examples of a subject that I can put them together as a project.  I have found that I have often photographed certain types of scenes when traveling, one of them being picnic tables and shelters at highway rest areas.  In the back of my mind there’s always the “maybe I’ll have enough for a project someday.”  Now, on their own as individual images, they might appear as mundane.  But put 30 of them together, and I have a coherent project.  Add in some history of them, some observations, and voila! a book.  That’s how I work.  

Some post offices - from my album on Flickr

Photography is different from writing, different from painting, different from sculpture, different from all the arts, in that an image can capture a fleeting moment.  That image can be incorporated into a larger, coherent body of work if you have taken enough images to coalesce into something.  So many things change over time, yet that singular image is proof that at some point in time, at some place, that thing, that place, that person, that belief  existed.  I guess my point is that you never know how important an image might be at the moment that you make it. As someone that photographs a lot of things, I know that some of the places that I photographed  a few years ago no longer exist.  Some of the places have irrevocably changed.  People that I photographed years ago are no longer with the living, but they still exist in a photograph.

A good example of photographing change over time are the photographs by Nicholas Nixon of the Brown sisters. In a series of photographs from 1975-1999, he captured the beauty, grace, and maturing of four sisters each year.  That’s quite a wonderful book, and as I age, I appreciate how much effort it is to take on a long-term project.  I’ll be turning 70 in December, and I have a lot that I want to accomplish in the years ahead.  Fortunately for me, I have a lot to draw from as far as accumulations of “projects.”   I use Flickr a lot - I can organize my images better, and as I accrue additional photographs, it's easy to add them to an album. For me, it's worth the money to have as much of my work in there as I want.

some rest areas - soon to be a small zine.

My advice for anyone starting out in photography is first of all -- observe.  Look.  What things do you see that resonate with you?  I know some photographers start out with “I want to be a X photographer,” where X= whatever genre fits.  Others sort of find their metier after a few years of photography. Some photographers are all over the place (that would be me), but strong in a certain genre.  The more you photograph, the better you’ll be, and the experience and accumulation of images will be a benefit if you keep at it.

Another project in the works

I’ll be traveling to Tucson in about a week to help my daughter move back East, and having her close-by in NC will be absolutely great.  While I’ll be driving a U-Haul truck, I’ll still be able to stop and take some photos, and fill in some gaps in my “projects” yet to come.  If you have never been to Route 66, this is the centennial year of the road.  A lot of what was there 50 years ago is either in ruins or gone, but enough remains to make it worthwhile to see for yourself.  However, it does not matter what route you take, but the time that you spend on it with a camera and an open mind will be a gift to yourself.

I’ll be back with some new posts in September.