Holding Back to Move Forward: Deepening the Practice

I’ve been working on a project lately which I don’t think I’ve spoken about. It began early last summer and at first I didn’t think much of it. I did a couple of days shooting and culled through about 800 images looking for the story I thought I had shot. I was moved to do so by a post that Dan Milnor (aka Smogranch) had posted about making “picture packages.” I thought I might try to force myself to edit rigorously in order to make a small package of images, 6 to 8 of them, around a common theme. I thought this a good exercise; it would improve my visual storytelling a bit.

Oh boy!

As it turns out, as I was going through the edit, printing out images, sorting through them in piles (“in, out, in, in, out, out, out, out, out….” that sort of thing), I began to notice a theme. I was being drawn to images that depicted a an alternate aspect to what I thought I had shot. “Uh-oh!” I said to myself, “there is another story in here.” A story I had not noticed initially.

Perhaps I had something and I worked it up into what I thought was a decent grouping and then I sought some feedback. I sent it over to Ray Ketcham, who mentors a bunch of good folks, and asked for his feedback. The feedback was good. Ray thought I was on to something, but it needed a bit more; more hook, more buy in, more depth. So I need some more images to complete the story. The trouble is what I photographed is seasonal, and the season had ended.

So, I sit with these images. They live on my refrigerator. I move them around sometimes but mostly they just sit there, staring at me, calling me, taunting me. This has gone on for for a long time. So long in fact that during a Skype call with Ray not too long ago he queried me as to my progress on the project. “Errr…..it’s sitting there staring at me, Ray, driving me a bit crazy!” was my response, I think. Something like that. Or maybe that is what I  thought while my response was something closer to, “I know, I know…” followed by some excuses for the hurdles keeping me from completing the project; something about wanting the processing to be consistent in the images.

And then Ray pushed me into the deep end of visual storytelling and documentary photography. “Don’t worry about the processing right now, just go out and make the pictures. You process them later, after you’ve got them.”

Well don’t that just fly in the face of this “post as you go” internet world!

And don’t that just deepen the process of working on a project! I’m finding myself working, shooting, shooting, shooting. Gathering the data, the images, and then gathering more. The edit comes later. Of course now I realize that this makes absolute sense, but it was that one comment from Ray that has encouraged me to hold back on the releasing of images on certain subjects as I work through the process of capturing all the images I need. It has lead to a slow down on this blog: a deepening, a a slowing, holding in order to move forward and develop this skill, this story, this art.

So I apologize for not posting as much, but I hope it will be well worth it in the long run… I may have to start posting some minor images, pictures of stuff from here and there just to keep a flow on this blog. But then again, what is the purpose of that?! Do I want my work to be images of this and that (believe me, I’ve got plenty!) or do I want my work to deepen? What do you want?