In a project, the main focus is always to finish.
Why should I care about finishing my photography…. I don’t want to do that. I want to keep on doing it.
Oh, it doesn’t mean you have to stop photographing, you just finish a project and move on to the next. Well, maybe I don’t want to do that either. I love shooting some of the subjects I do, I don’t want to stop doing that either. I can fool myself into believing I have finished a project, but when I look through the files later, it is obvious that I just continued shooting the subject.
So, to bring up an old saying (not sure I get it right in English, but you’ll probably get the point), “The goal is the journey”. It’s not about getting there.
It is truly fulfilling to have something “finished” work to show for from time to time. Some of my motivation comes from seeing an end product. So, how does this fit in. Let’s change the word “finished” with “finished for now”. When you’re just following the muse, working on whatever makes you feel good, it usually ends up with piles of almost finished work floating around. Then at some point, the frustration may come that “I’m just fooling around doing nothing”. Ok, now there is something that disturbs the joy of it, and there is a couple of bad solutions, like ignoring it, or quitting. But in order to fix it, some work must be done. So maybe a short burst of boring labor will bring out something you can be proud of. Is it finished? probably not. It is only finished when you later on discover that you didn’t do more work on the subject, or when this was the best you managed to produce. If you still have more in you, the work will continue, and at some point you will make a new “finished”, and another one. In a project, the goal is to finish, and when you reach the finish line, the quality of the product is whatever it is. If you follow you passion, you want to milk your full potential. It feels so much better to “finish” something, knowing that I will remake it as soon as I find a way to do it better, instead of finishing it and being frustrated forever that I didn’t do it differently.
So, to sum up.
I want to be an amateur in the true sense of the word; doing this for the love of it.
I want to enjoy the journey, and from time to time, I’ll make a stop, and maybe I leave something behind, but I will soon continue. Maybe you’ll find something better at my next stop, maybe something completely different, who knows.
I am still back and forth on this, but the one take away is that I now understand that I work on photographic series, not photographic projects. Which for me is a thought or concept that I want to explore, so I think we are traveling down similar roads.
Now the idea of a “project: may be a bunch of tasks to package what I have experienced with a series (to date), such as into a book. Or to have an invitation to present a workshop and I have a “project” to develop the powerpoint presentation.
I guess that I find myself working on themes & concepts and I am trying to understand them, and myself, better by placing a few more labels, such as a “series” on them. I also now seem to understand better the inherent danger of limiting myself with those same labels.