I’m planning out a couple of photography-centered days and I’ve been looking for inspiration. It’s been a while since I really focused on a goal that was guided by some kind of teaching resource, as I did when I was experimenting with lighting in our former basement.
I dusted off a book called The Photographer’s Playbook that has never really worked for me and it still doesn’t. Its subtitle is “307 Assignments and Ideas”, drawn from various photographers and teachers of photography. If this is what formal instruction in photography looks like in art schools, I’m kind of glad to be an auto-didact—a lot of the exercises seem self-involved in various ways. I understand what many of them are driving at, which is to force an aspirant photographer to grapple with the mystery of inspiration, to envision art rather than technique, to find a voice. I am at that impasse—just getting a technically good photograph is not enough to motivate me, though there are still plenty of technical experiments I could learn from (digital forms of collage or layering in particular seem appealing, and those require both some camera-side decisions and some further mastery of post-processing techniques beyond my haphazard knowledge). But I’m not getting there via writing imaginary letters to my favorite photographer or imagining that these are the last seven photos I will take in my life or taking photographs while nude or listing the fifty greatest things in life. There’s a reason a lot of artists are reluctant to talk about their art beyond discussions of technique, and maybe the #1 reason is that it’s really hard not to sound pompous in reflecting on creative process and imagination.
I dealt out some cards from a sort-of game box called My Photography Toolbox and those are more useful. You’re called upon to deal yourself a hand with the cards that are marked by different categories (Composition, Attitude, Genre, Principles) and then use the photographs on the cards as inspiration for your own. I could do that, though it’s a challenge to match up the locations required with the time and opportunity. I often try to handle choices that are too big, situated in a vast possibility space, via randomness of the ‘close your eyes and pick a spot on the map’ or ‘generate a movie title from a big database and watch that’. The problem is that I also usually cheat, meaning I will reject lots of those random choices because I don’t feel like whatever came up. Which often means I’m just trying to stay inside a familiar range of options without admitting that to myself.
I think the best options come from a series of books called 52 Assignments, where the goals are more technical (often including very specific constraints) but still offer a wide range of choices. The street photography volume might be just the thing for a long day of walking around Philadelphia—I see several assignments right off the bat that I’d like to try: an exercise in photographing signage, a “waiting game” built around finding a compelling background that calls out for a particular subject, looking for great silhouettes, and more. I’ve ordered the macro and nature versions of the books and may use those too soon.
Yes, my dslr has metadata associated with each shot, which is often useful. I have some older photos from an early digital point-and-shoot camera that don't have that data, which is sometimes frustrating. We were just talking about this a bit today because my cousin sent me some old photos, some of which have notes on the back and some don't--a common problem for historians to have to puzzle through (who is that? when is this?). But here I am posting some of these images shorn of some of their metadata--once again mysteries of a sort.
Funnily, I’ve been playing with a similar book, only this one is on figure drawing. I have zero technique because I have no real training, so that has been kind of tough. But I’m trying it.