I’m back

In early January, I attended Review LA, a portfolio review sponsored by Center and held in conjunction with photo la in my old neighborhood, Santa Monica. This was my first official portfolio review, and I came away with concrete advice on places to send my work, images to cut from my portfolio, approaches to take going forward—it was everything I hoped it would be.

And yet, since then, I’ve been stuck in the doldrums. Just in the past few weeks, I’ve bemoaned my apparent inability to get anything done, thrown in the towel (at least temporarily on my In Store project), tried to get going on something else, all with lackluster results.

Today I realized that I haven’t been wasting time these past couple months. I’ve actually been processing everything I’ve learned—I just didn’t know it.

I went out this morning on my second shoot for a new project I’d been thinking about for a while (and on which I’d gotten some strong encouragement at Review LA from Kristine Wilson of Ogilvy & Mather). It’s the kind of project that looks good on paper but doesn’t hold as much promise in the execution. I may give it another try, but I identified some critical issues with it that just aren’t going away, so if you’re placing bets, I’d bet against my resuming it anytime soon.

The good news is that, while working on this new project, trying different approaches, thinking about why it wasn’t working for me, I defined more clearly for myself what my In Store project is about for me and why I am (present tense, not past) passionate about it. I’d gotten some feedback from people that they wanted to see more images of the items in storage, images with people in them. In fact, Portrait Month was all about my getting comfortable with making portraits, in an effort to prepare myself for incorporating portraits into In Store. I had so much fun in December, and I’m really pleased with some of the portraits I made. But I don’t think portraits belong in In Store, and here’s why: That project, for me, isn’t about the people who have stuff in storage. It’s about the places where we put our stuff. I say in my project statement, written before all this talk of portraits began, that for me it’s about “imagining what’s behind closed doors.” Imagining. Not literally finding out. For me, the magic of these places is more real when I focus on the buildings and structures themselves, telling myself stories about what’s there and why.

When this dawned on me this afternoon at coffee with S., I could feel the wind pick up and my sail caught that wind, and that was all I needed.

I went home and took a fresh look at the images in the project, and I could see that, of the forty-five images on my site right now, only about fifteen of them are ones I consider good. The rest are lacking in some way. But that’s okay—I’ll keep working on the project, swap out the images that aren’t working with new ones that do, until I have the project where I want it to be, until it’s done.

Another agenda item: Read more poetry. (Who doesn’t need more poetry in her life?) Step away from the television and PDN, and pick up a book, something that has nothing at all to do with photography. David McCullough’s 1776 has been on my shelf for a long time. So have Pablo Neruda and Coast of Dreams. Maybe I’ll start there.

I’m back.