Starting Your First Project

The specificity is what gives a project its frame. Here is what specificity actually looks like.

We wrote here before about how project photography can elevate your work and what happens when a photographer commits to a subject over time. Depth that reactive shooting almost never produces. A forced editorial discipline that sharpens what you're actually trying to say. A point of view that only emerges under sustained attention. We ended that piece with a promise. Practical ideas for actually starting one.

Here they are, along with a real look at what commitment to a project actually looks like once someone has been doing it for months.

lilartsy @lilartsy

Place based projects

This is often the easiest entry point if you have never sustained a project before, because it removes the hardest variable in most other kinds of long-term work, you don't need to find willing subjects, build trust with strangers, or gain access to anything. You just need a place, and the discipline to keep returning to it.

The same street corner, visited two or three times a week for as long as it takes to actually know it. The same short walk, repeated at the same time of day across every season, so the changes become the subject rather than an accident. The same body of water, returned to enough times that you start to understand its specific moods rather than photographing it the way any first-time visitor would.

Joe Moro's Block series, which we featured here recently, is the clearest possible proof of what this category can actually produce. He has been returning to the same corner of Elizabeth Street in Melbourne two or three times a week for months. Not once, not for a strong afternoon, but repeatedly, deliberately, as a practice. What has come out of that is a body of work with a quality no single visit could ever produce. He knows what the light does at different hours now. He recognizes the regulars, the people who move through that corner often enough to have become part of its rhythm. He has waited long enough on that specific block to see patterns a passing photographer would walk straight past without noticing. That depth is visible in the images themselves, and it did not exist in the first week. It only exists because he kept going back.

If you are looking for the single easiest place to start a first project, this is probably it. Pick a place. Commit to a schedule. Let the tenth visit teach you what the first one couldn't.

Community based projects

A trade, a subculture, a gathering that happens on a recurring schedule, a group of people connected by something specific enough to give the project a real frame. This category asks more of you than a place-based project does, since it requires building actual trust with the people you're photographing, but it tends to produce work with a different kind of intimacy once that trust is established.

A weekly market and the vendors who work it. A recreational group that meets on the same night every week, a run club, a dance circle, a card game in the same park. A trade you're curious about but don't practice yourself, approached with genuine interest rather than a single transactional shoot.

Theme based projects

Rather than one place or one group, a recurring visual idea followed across many different subjects and locations. Hands at work, photographed wherever you happen to find them. Doorways and thresholds, the specific moment of passing from one space into another. Waiting, in all its forms, a bus stop, a waiting room, a line outside a shop.

This category is harder to sustain than it sounds, because the temptation is to let it stay vague, and vague is exactly what a project cannot be. A project about hands is not really specific enough on its own. A project about hands at work, specifically the moment just before something is finished, is.

Constraint Based Projects

Sometimes the easiest way to sustain commitment is to remove decision fatigue entirely by imposing an artificial limit. One lens, for a full year, regardless of what it costs you in flexibility. One hour a week, same day, same time, no exceptions. Never leaving a one mile radius of home, forcing you to find what's actually there rather than assuming you already need to travel somewhere more interesting.

The constraint does something valuable that an open-ended project cannot. It removes the endless psychological negotiation about whether today is worth going out for, because the rule has already made that decision for you.

What all of these actually require

None of these categories need a commission, a gallery, or a publication behind them. What they need is a subject specific enough to actually be a subject, not life, not people, not the human condition, but a corner, a trade, a gesture, a limit, and the discipline to return to it past the point where the novelty has worn off.

Joe Moro did not know on his first visit to that corner of Elizabeth Street what the project would eventually become. He knew he was curious about that specific block, and he kept showing up. The vision came later, the way it almost always does, not before the commitment but because of it.

Pick something specific. Go back. Let the tenth visit show you what the first one never could.