A recurring theme has been coming up a lot recently with photographer friends of mine – about the importance of photo projects.

Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned professional who just happens to be stuck in a slump, my best advice to get things going again is to pick a project. The idea of a project can be extremely simple – even just a single word (e.g. “happiness” or “rain”). Once you’ve chosen it, shoot that, and nothing else, for a month. A project has the effect of constraining what and how you shoot and as a result, those constraints force you to innovate. As a photographer all the distractions of daily life can sometimes stop us from seeing clearly – a more limited field of view helps solve that. Sometimes too much choice can be a bad thing.

For me – photo projects have been a huge part of my development. I’ve made no secret about the day my photography became serious – it was when I saw Chuck Inglefield’s Urban Melancholy project. After that, I realised what photography truly could offer and I stopped randomly shooting everything around me and decided to choose a simple abstract theme to improve my skills. My first project was “Negative Space” – a photographic technique that I still enjoy using today. For a month, I mounted a prime lens to my D70 and only shot subjects to which that description would apply. The images overall were among the better ones I had shot to that point but more importantly it taught how me how to compose properly. Also, a couple of shots from that original project still rank among my favourites:

Following Negative Space, I started a photo documentary project called “Modern City Living” . My idea was to capture street scenes of Singapore (my home at the time) in a slightly creative way – the aim being to reflect the densely populated nature of a city and what that meant for its inhabitants. This was also the project where I learned how to use Photoshop properly. A couple of images from that project follow:

When I look back on the images as whole, there are many things that I’d do differently now – but again, the point here was progression.

After Modern City Living, my photography veered into two directions simultaneously. One was finding and gaining access to abandoned buildings in Singapore – the other was shooting portraiture (usually in the same locations). For some time, this combination became my “calling card” and a style for which I became known. Many of the locations have since become inaccessible / torn down / replaced with condominiums. A small sample follows – you can see a larger collection of my shots from these sits here.

Following that, then became my beginnings into “Narrative Photography” which I’ve already written about extensively on this site.

And that was the end for photo projects for me for some time. After that I did mostly commercial work (where the subjects / themes were chosen for me) and my photography veered off in a number of different directions. However I still consider the photo project to be an incredibly simple yet powerful tool for building a body of work and skills. For me, it was during those formative  projects where I obtained a grounding in technique, composition, etc.

The concept of the photo project is not a new one either. Go to any decent photo book store and you’ll see many of the titles are extremely simple themes. Random examples (which I happened to see in the library at my last visit) include:

• Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age by the legendary Sebastiao Salgado (this book is incredible)
• Ellen Von Unwerth: Couples- by one of my favourite photographers (more on this one in a later post)
• People I Sleep With (people and their pets)
• Men Before 10 AM Too (simple concept – nice idea)

When choosing a photo project of your own, you can choose something broad (e.g. “family”) or something very narrow (e.g. “families eating fast food”). I personally prefer the latter as it’s there that the constraints are at their greatest and as a result, you often find the most creative ideas.  Anyway, if this concept is new (or even if you knew it already but it serves as a reminder) – I hope you’ll find it gives you a new idea of how to get things going. Feel free to comment below for any ideas of projects that you might shoot next.