Do you grok? For those of you that haven't read Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert Heinlein (I highly recommend it), grok is a Martian word that doesn't translate well into English but has a meaning akin to 'understand in fullness.'
Lately I've been looking at submitting a photo project to a few different competitions and exhibitions. Only one small problem, don't have a complete project handy. Just lots of photos and some notions about themes and concepts.
Previous 'projects' of mine have been more a product of frustration and a 'fuck it, send it' attitude, want to take a more thoughtful approach this time, so I've been trying to grok photo projects. It's not going well.
How do you define and refine it down to 10-20 photos with a coherent theme connecting them? Thought looking at some of the projects featured on some of the photography websites might help but many of them left my brain going error 404: explanation not found.
The thought had occurred to me to go the 'if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit' route. Just throw a bunch of random photos together, make up some bullshit to go with them, and then sit back and pretend it's deep. Would rather save that for Plan B though.
Don't worry, none of that here, just a random collection of photos that caught my eye recently.
What makes a project a project? Is it purely the photographer's say so?
So for the photographers who happen to find themselves perusing this, a few questions: How do you narrow down/select your shots? Is there any sort of system you use for making it easier? What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
Have wanted to do a photo book on the protests here back in 2020 for some time now but have run into the same issues with conceptualizing it.
May need to start with a smaller project and then use that as a bridge to a larger project or a book.
For the longest time, if I wanted to do something on a given topic I was usually stuck working with photos from a single shoot. As I've built up a back catalogue over the years, I now have more in the way of variety to choose from but that hasn't made the choosing any easier.
That's probably enough out of me, if you have any thoughts or ideas drop me a comment. Or come find me, I'll be hanging out back.
