Want to see an example of what dedication to a photography project looks like? Check out The Fortieth Parallel, an ongoing series by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based photographer Bruce Myren. It’s a set of photographs captured across the 40th degree of latitude across the United States, at every whole degree of longitude. See those markers on the Google Map above? Those are all the photo spots that Myren aims to photograph. Read more…
Back in March, we wrote about photographer Bob Carey‘s Tutu Project, which consists of self-portraits Carey created while wearing only a pink tutu. The project started out as a fun image made for a non-profit ballet organization, but soon transformed into something much more after Carey’s wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. The folks over at PocketWizard recently interviewed Carey, creating the touching short film above that offers a behind-the-scenes look at how the project came about (warning: you might want to have some Kleenex nearby). Read more…
New York Times photographer Damon Winter shot a neat portrait project earlier this year during the London Olympics. Titled Their Golden Years, the Times tracked down former athletes who represented the United States of America during the 1948 Olympic games, which were also held in London. The project provides a neat little biographical glimpse into each athletes life, using before-and-after photos, a brief description of what they did, and short audio interviews in which they share some memories. Read more…
The photographs in photographer Gail Albert Halaban‘s series Out My Window are unsettling and beautiful at the same time. Each of them shows people framed by open apartment windows in New York City — quite creepy if the images are actually of unsuspecting strangers. At the same time, the voyeur is quite a photographer, as each shot perfectly balances the lighting of the subject inside with the cityscapes and brick walls outside.
The scenes were actually all staged, and are intended to share something that Halaban says New Yorkers can relate to: “connecting” with neighbors through apartment windows. Read more…
Photographer Joseph O. Holmes spent four years between 2007 and 2011 documenting the place where a person’s personal and professional lives meet: their desk. He traveled around to various companies and businesses making photographs of workspaces exactly as he found them. Read more…
1 to 100 Years Project is an awesome portrait project by Belgian photographer Edouard Janssens in which he photographed 100 women and 100 men at each age between 1 and 100. His goal was to show the aging process in a positive manner and to provide an interesting visualization of the link between generations. He didn’t handpick the subjects either — all the participants volunteered through the project’s website (excluding the kids, of course). Read more…
After amassing 626 friends on Facebook two years ago, Tanja Hollander began to wonder how many of them were actually friends in the conventional sense. She then set out to answer the question by meeting each one of them and photographing them in their homes. The portraits are published on a website set up for the project, titled The Facebook Portrait Project, and each photo includes some information about the subject and their relationship to Hollander. Read more…
Maho Beach outside of Princess Juliana International Airport in Sint Maarten is famous for the fact that landing airplanes fly overhead at minimal altitude. It’s one of the only places in the world where airplanes can be viewed in their flightpath just outside the end of the runway, and therefore is very popular with tourists and plane spotters. Austrian photographer Josef Hoflehner has a project titled “Jet Airliner” that consists of photos of massive jet airliners hovering over the heads of sunbathers on the beach. Read more…
Cesar Kuriyama spent a couple years saving enough money to take an entire year off from work — his 30th year of life. He spent that year living frugally, doing all the things he never had enough time to do: travelling, personal creative projects, and spending time with family. He decided to document that special year by capturing 1 second of footage every single day and creating a short compilation video at the end, similar to Madeline’s video that we shared back in January. After completing the year, Kuriyama now is planning to capture 1 second from each day for the rest of his life. This means he’ll have a 5-hour video summarizing 50 years of life if he lives to be 80, since every decade creates roughly one hour of video.
Lee has often worked without a specific project in mind, simply making pictures of what he saw, in order, as Garry Winogrand said, to see what it looked like photographed. This way of working led him to look at his contact sheets (of which there have been an astonishing number) to find out what was there that he might not have expected. His shadow, and more clearly defined versions of himself, turned up with regularity. At some point early on Lee realized that he was making self-portraits along with many other photographs that were defining a new landscape for all of us who saw his work. There is a great lesson in this for photographers of today who dedicate themselves to one project or another, failing to understand that the best work might come from an obsession with the medium rather than the personally oriented choice of what might be done with it. Lee always has a camera with him and is constantly making pictures. How much better the work of today might be if all the young and dedicated photographers took up this habit.
If you’re in a creative rut and can’t think of a “project” idea, don’t worry — just be obsessed with photography itself and constantly be ready to photograph what interests you.
