I’ve spent the better part of six months telling myself I need a photography project. The logic is sound: focused work develops technique faster than scattered shooting, sustained exploration reveals patterns in my visual thinking, and constraints paradoxically liberate creativity. Yet here I sit, project-less, waiting for something to ignite sufficient passion to sustain months of dedicated work.
This hesitation brings up something uncomfortable about how we frame creative development: we’ve mythologised the photography project as requiring deep emotional investment, as if every series must emerge from profound personal connection or burning social commentary. I suspect this romantic notion keeps more photographers stuck than it inspires.
But most successful projects begin with curiosity, not passion. When I look at the work that genuinely moves me, it often started with technical questions or formal experiments. Vivian Maier wasn’t driven by passion for street photography initially; she was exploring what happened when you pointed a camera at strangers. The passion developed through practice.
Perhaps the barrier isn’t finding something I care about deeply enough. Perhaps it’s accepting that caring can develop through engagement rather than preceding it. Is a project like a relationship?
I make it sound like a revelation and it is for me. When I started this post a while back (it’s been stuck in the pipeline for a long time, going nowhere), I didn’t yet know why I couldn’t start a project. I felt I needed one, but somehow couldn’t make a move in the right direction. As I explained, this newsletter is a sounding board where I use writing to progress my understanding. And here it is: real time revelation.
This reframes the challenge entirely: instead of waiting for the perfect subject to reveal itself, I could choose something technically interesting and let meaning emerge through sustained attention. I might fail. It might lead nowhere. But I would have started.
Or maybe I should go with the contrary approach: pick a constraint that pushes against my current comfort zone. If you typically shoot wide, commit to 85mm for three months. If you avoid people, photograph the same stranger-dense location weekly. If you love colour, work exclusively in black and white. The subject matter becomes secondary to the systematic exploration of seeing.
This isn’t settling for less meaningful work. It’s recognising that meaning often emerges from depth rather than arriving pre-formed. The photographer who spends months documenting their local bus stop often discovers more about human behaviour than the one who travels across continents chasing supposedly significant moments.
The project serves your development, not your ego. You don’t need to find the perfect subject that perfectly represents your perfect artistic vision. You need to pick something and begin the systematic work of seeing what happens when you look at it repeatedly, carefully, over time.
The growth comes from the sustained attention itself, not from the worthiness of what receives that attention. I don’t know yet what I project will be, but I feel like I removed a stumbling block.
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