The Projects
Recently, an ex student who has been at it for awhile "complained" to me that she was "always behind with her files". I understood her concerns, but told her that this was a good sign. It meant she was shooting and traveling regularly, and not just shooting when assignments come in. Over time, many photographers stop shooting for themselves, and mostly just shoot for their clients. My concern with that approach is after awhile you just keep copying the look of your website, and you stop growing visually and possibly intellectually. My primary motivation for doing photography is that it is a really fun thing to do, and it allows me to really pay attention to the things that either fascinate or concern me. A lot of things interest me beyond photography. It is for this reason that my website also includes work from personal projects, of which there are at least a dozen. It also gives existing and potential clients a better understanding of your general aesthetics and also, what happens when you play art director.
The issue with putting projects on an assignment oriented site is that that they should augment the site, as opposed to diluting your assignment oriented message. The way we addressed this on my site was to to place the projects in their own separate section.
Presently, there are three projects up on the site; Small Paradise, Rocks and Rim Fire. Both Small Paradise and Rim Fire are landscape oriented projects, while Rocks is a small sampling of a self published book of my extensive rock collection that I worked on for a few years. Rocks is visually similar to the still life imagery on the site, except for the use of a painted gray backdrop across the whole project.
The two landscape projects fall somewhat outside the bounds of the front end of the website. I really love photographing landscape, but pure landscape assignments are few and far between. When clients need landscape imagery, they either go to stock photo sites or directly contact a photographer for work to license. This type of licensing has really expanded in the last two decades with the shift in technology. I can shoot a couch in the studio, and drop it into a preexisting environment with relative ease.
Small Paradise much like Rocks is a nonconceptual project where each image is self contained in it's meaning. The primary concern in this project is scale, beauty lies not only in the sweeping grand locale, but also in smaller quiet more intimate spaces. To some degree, it is a visual reaction to the grand spaces we commonly see in calendars and books of places where most of us could create a beautiful photo at sunset. It really is not difficult to create an affective photo of a place that is magnificent to begin with.
When it comes to the Rim Fire project though, we are working structurally and conceptually far outside the bounds of most assignment photography. The working name of this project is really MORE, HOTTER, and BIGGER. It is primarily concerned with the impact of wildfires in the American West as droughts and global warming become facts in our lives. The goal of the project is to track the recovery of an area that is just west of Yosemite National Park after a devastating fire in summer/autumn 2013. To that end every three months since October 2013, I have returned to the area to photograph at specific locations mostly documenting botanical changes in the environment along with logging in certain sections of the fire footprint. The visual structure of the project is based upon the organizational approach the Bechers took in photographing invisible architecture in both Europe and the U.S., see below, except the goal here is change over time as opposed, to comparing variation within type.
Besides the content of the project being outside the usual range of most landscape photography, which appears to be consumed with a sense of the sublime, the community evolution and disruption being documented here only allows meaning to arise when the same series of photos are compared over time simultaneously. The goal here has not been to create beautiful photos, but rather to illustrate a natural process visually.
While on the website, we have objects across a wide span of their life cycles, the Rim Fire photos move from death into life. What we also find out, is that change over time is all over my work. In a commercial or editorial setting, this manifests in common items being reduced to a single graphically bold image, and in the broader project setting the process that leads to the rotting flowers is recorded as if in slow motion or film stills.
