The Perceptive Photographer

Context and meaning from the outside

After getting the heat cranked up in the studio, I got to start recording some podcast episodes. Damn, it was cool in here today. Now that it warmed up, we are digging into episode 606 of the Perceptive Photographer, where we are looking at the choices we make about what not to include in the frame. While we focus a lot on what we put in the frame, I am starting to wonder if what we leave out is more interesting.

Beyond the Frame

When I started in photography, I was focused on the frame. The composition, the point of view, the angle of view and such, but
composition isn’t random; we pick and choose what to include. What if what we don’t include tells us more about the photographer than what is in the frame?

What We Leave Out Changes the Story

In this context, what we exclude can alter the interpretation of an image. We actually rely on this and want viewers to fill in the blanks. This ambiguity provides curiosity and intrigue, or does it offer up a deception? For me, the more interesting question is: are we as the photographer even in on the deception?

Photographic Blind Spots

I know for a fact that I often do the same things over and over again. I have learned that these concepts work in my images. But these habits might actually become blind spots. I don’t see what I am doing, and what I am leaving out of the frame might be the very things I need to make a more meaningful image.

Expand the frame exercise.

Photograph a place you have photographed before, changing your position, perspective, composition (habitual actions), or framing. Go home, process them and then really spend some time comparing the image’s meaning. You might find that a simple change results in a completely different narrative.

Wrap it up already

Don’t just think about your photography as what you see and include in the frame, but also what you see that you don’t. It’s not only about what we photograph but also about what remains unseen. Maybe there is some mystery and storytelling that you can use when you open the story up a little.

Quotes from the end

I used to think I was the strangest person in the world, but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this, you know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.
— Frida Kahlo8

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.

— Joan Miro

If I already have a vision, my work is almost done. The rest is just a technical problem.
— Hiroshi Sugimoto

What do you want me to look at and notice?

It is amazing how much this concept of audience, meaning and what an audience has to know about your work comes up. This podcast is a revisit of an oft-discussed topic in our episodes, but nonetheless, the conversation about what we should tell an audience about our work and what we shouldn’t keeps coming up for me again and again. 

So in this episode of the podcast, we return to look at what we should share and why we should share information about our work with our audience. I mean, I do get the point that some artist make that they don’t want to “taint” the audience into not having their own experience of the work. That idea comes with some big assumptions, like your audience has enough language to experience the work. So many times I hear photographers say that they like a photograph and can say no more than /i like it. It’s good. The reason for that feedback is that it is all they have in their language set to speak about an image. 

I feel that the more we can understand how to help the viewer see the work, the better. This can lead to a different set of questions and considerations that we should make as the photographer to help the viewer. Questions like: What is this? can offer a simple entry point to an image, but by asking more complex questions when we make the work, we might open the door to more meaning. 

Questions like:

What do you want me to feel?

What do you want me to consider?

What are you asking me to do?

These types of more open-ended questions that go beyond what is just in the frame open up a deeper conversation between the viewer and the image. As I said, this isn’t a new topic on the podcast, but one that is always worth revisiting if you are interested in deeper connections with your work behind the camera, processing, printing and sharing the work. 

Also, don’t forget: if you are in Seattle, save the date for my lecture at the Photographic Center Northwest on November 5th—more details to come.

Intro

Welcome to episode 604 of the Perceptive Photographer podcast. Before we jump into today’s topic, how long should your project take to finish? Just a couple of quick reminders. First, if you are in the Seattle area on November 5, make sure you save that date to come down and check out my lecture on landscape, meaning and identity at the Photographic Center Northwest. Also, if you are in the central Oregon area on October 17, I’ll be doing a one-day workshop with the Cascade Camera Club on workflow and editing in Lightroom. In the afternoon, I’ll help with image triage on the photos you bring in, focusing on editing and processing. Should be a lot of fun.

Today we’re talking about how long it should take to complete a project, which is a really interesting question. The short answer is it takes as long as it takes; however, a few things can impact our thoughts and approaches to working with projects.

Single Image or Projects

I think one of the first things that’s important is for you to decide if you’re working on single images or you’re actually working on a project. I think when we do single image photography, it’s fun. We enjoy it. It’s super interesting. But at some point, we realize we have a lot of the same sort of thing happening over and over again, and we think about how those images might relate. Thus, we start a project; even if we aren’t doing a project, we start one.

Clarity of Purpose

And I think as we start those projects, it’s important for us to consider the clarity of purpose around that project. Are we doing this for technical, artistic, narrative purposes? What do we need to do when the project’s done? What does it mean when we have work that we return to over and over again? Because the essence of a project is determined not by how much time it takes, but whether or not the project communicates what we want.

And as I mentioned in the podcast, sometimes what we end up with is a series of small projects that roll up into a larger project a project that might take a very short amount of time or a project that might take our entire life. There is no right length of time for a project. What there is is the right amount of time for us to get what we need out of a project. That might be something as simple as how the camera works or as complex as our identity as it evolves.

Conclusion

As I mentioned, in the beginning, it takes as long as it takes, but what matters is recognizing when a project is actually done, versus when we’re walking away because it’s hard, or that it probably never should’ve been a project at all.

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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.

In this week’s episode, we’re gonna be talking a little bit about questions and asking the correct questions. Before we jump into the nuts and bolts of the week, just a couple of quick reminders: first, I’ve got a book club that’s running, so you can join that by clicking on the book club link from the workshops and classes section of my website. Also, save the date: November 5 for a lecture I’ll be presenting at the Photographic Center Northwest on ” Does a Landscape Speak, and How Do We Listen? It’ll be free to anyone who registers; it will be a great time.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been circling back on this question idea and asking the right questions with several of my workshops and conversations with friends. Each time, this notion of questions versus answers keeps rearing its head. And I’ve started to think really long and hard about the impact of asking the right question at the right time and how that makes us better photographers. I think too many times we ask the wrong question, get an answer and are just happy that we have an answer, and we move on. But so many times, if we ask the right question, we get access to that part of a project that we may not even be aware of the thing that sort of sits in our blind spot.

So today on the podcast, we’re going to dive a little bit into that notion of asking the right question and what that might mean for our creative process.