Personal photography
Your kitchen counter at 7 AM. Someone’s unmade bed caught in afternoon light. A stranger’s mug collection on open shelving. These images shouldn’t matter. They’re compositionally unremarkable, technically forgettable, and utterly ordinary.
If we really only cared about excellence, these should end up in the bin. Yet to me they’re among the most compelling photographs.
I’ve noticed something about the photography advice floating around online. Everyone talks about finding your “style” or upgrading your gear, but nobody mentions the one thing that actually separates competent photographers from exceptional ones: obsession.
Other people’s photos are always more interesting to me. When I look at other people’s photos, I always find them better made than mine: the technique is better, the composition is better, the tones are better, the colours or contrast are better, the artistic vision is more obvious, they’re more innovative, and the general idea is more interesting.
One of the things I’ve struggled with lately is what I called to myself “the trap of meaningfulness”. I need to put names on things to think about them, even if it’s not the right one others use, don’t judge me.
I’ve watched, and sometimes was involved in, countless conversations about creativity that devolve into the same tired refrain: “Quality matters more than quantity”, “creativity can’t be controlled”, and my personal favourite “I prefer creating high-value work rather than churning out rubbish”.
This thinking is nonsense.
Since I restarted photography after long hiatus, I decided to concentrate on monochrome. For some reason, it came naturally to me to not produce colourful images anymore.
I’m a technician. Not an artist. I have no doubt about that. So why do I pretend to make photos? (in the Ansel Adams sense)
There is a scene in the animated series Archer where everybody is stuck in the elevator. Krieger, the mad scientist, is holding a Thermos bottle. Someone asks him: is that soup in there? And he answers in an enigmatic way: define “soup”.
I discussed wanting but failing to start a project lately. My conclusion was that if you can’t find an obvious project, one way of starting could be to choose a technology, a constraint, or a theme, then go out and take photos to see where it goes.
I was in Oslo lately (for work). So I decided to put that conclusion into practice. I decided:
Finally, I decided to experiment with a few techniques:
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.
