The Perceptive Photographer5 project ideas to make project. it’s all very meta
We are up to episode 603 of the Perceptive Photographer podcast, and this week we are going all meta meta on how to make projects.
Just a quick note before we jump into the actual meat and potatoes of the podcast show notes. Save November 5 if you’re in the Pacific Northwest area to pop by the Photographic Center Northwest for my lecture on the Landscape as Language and Identity. It should be an exciting evening and will be covering a lot of different photographic concepts.
For the podcast this week, as I said, we’re going a little meta. We’re talking about project ideas that help you come up with photo projects. It’s really just brainstorming ideas, but in my brainstorming I came up with meta meta as a title :).
The goal of this week’s podcast is to help you feel more comfortable with your work when you’re feeling creatively stuck. At times, when we are working on our various projects, we can get tired, and that leads to running out of steam. At that point, it can be hard, even when looking at a bunch of photographs that we feel are somehow connected, to actually turn them into a project. So hopefully these five ideas can help jumpstart your process.
Personal experiences. I think if we look back over our life over the past year, there’s a lot of great stories to tell. We could tell a funny, happy, sad, or difficult story, but those experiences in life offer us a rich source of interesting ways to approach our photography.
Combine unrelated things. When you find things that, in your mind, don’t seem related, put those words together and then see what comes up. This happened really well for me when I put the words photography and music together. For you, it might be something else; groups of things like family and architecture, food and memory, movement in nature and other pairs could be great for something unique to show up.
Contradictions. We’re looking for contradictions: two words that don’t seem to fit together, and then we photograph and explore what those might be.
Structures that exist with other narratives and storytelling formats. Looking at how stories are told, or projects are created in books, movies, poems, and plays, is a rich source of materials. Spend some time with one of these other forms and then figure out how to adopt some of that storytelling methodology into our own photography. It is also worth recognizing that every genre has a set of concepts and tropes that it uses for its storytelling and that we can apply those as well.
Hypotheticals Working with a list of what might be. Even if we don’t know how they might be possible, this should be just a fun brainstorming list of all the crazy things you can come up with. If you’re not getting very many crazy things, it’s cause you’re spending too much time trying to figure out how you might do something rather than just a list of what you might possibly do one day.
Hopefully this list of five things helps you jumpstart your crazy process when you’re feeling a little stuck on your Photographic projects, or they’re feeling a little stagnant and stale. Thanks so much for joining me this week, and we’ll see you next week on episode 604.
Stories of Art
