Last week I visited the lighthouse at Cordouan, on the French Atlantic coast, not far from where I live. It’s one of those things that aren’t far, but as a local you don’t do (e.g. when I grew up in Paris it took me many years to visit the Eiffel tower the first time even though I saw it nearly every day).
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”.
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.
When I was in Oslo early June, I tried to spend as much time as possible in the streets taking photos. For me, as I was there for work, it meant mainly in the morning on my way to the office. Which was good: the light was great. High enough to go between buildings, but not above them.
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:
Not to shoot monochrome because it’s currently my comfort zone.
Shoot only streets, because landscapes are a safe zone for me and I want to learn street (human activity) photography.