project

How a quest for the origins of my photography ended in an 800-kilometre walk (through my town).

Grii_ist is the final output (so far) of a photo project I started in April 2020. I have been photographing for about 15 years, have been a member of the Culemborg photography club Lek en Licht for more than 10 years and follow a mentorship (or two) every year. I prefer to work on long-term projects of a year or more. That way, I get much more depth in my work. Over the years, I have received many awards, often for my most personal works. Yet in the early 2020s, I began to feel the nagging desire. Why do I photograph in the first place? What makes me click and sometimes not? And if I do take a picture, what is it about?

I came up with a nice assignment for myself in which I was free to take photos at will, but in which I did impose a number of restrictions. These restrictions mainly served the purpose of being completely free in the images I shot, without thinking too hard. I decided that I would take pictures of things that I noticed while walking through the city. It was April 2020 and because of corona (but this is definitely NOT a corona project, let me be clear about that) I was working from home every day. In order not to sit behind my screen all day, I went for a walk every afternoon at lunch time. During that walk I took my camera with me, a Ricoh GRII. It is very convenient, because this small compact camera fits in my pocket and takes photos in RAW format. Because I like high-contrast, black and white photos, I set the camera to high-contrast black&white. The rest of the settings? Fully automatic. Let the camera think about how best to take the picture. All I had to do was to see something, point my camera and print. What you click is what you get'.

And so I started taking photos during my daily walks. I posted all the photos on my Flickr page. All of them. Even the ones I was not so happy with afterwards. Oh, and all of them unedited. All images came straight from the camera. The goal was not to make the most beautiful, best photos, but to learn why I made those photos. Posting on Flickr soon stopped, because the whole upload process is rather cumbersome. I switched to Instagram. That worked a lot faster and the project soon attracted a number of followers. That was not the goal either, but it did teach me which photos appealed more to 'the audience'.

In the meantime, I kept a complete record of the photos I took. The sequential number, format, moment (day, evening, night), tone, genre, subject matter, frame filling, line play, point of interest, you name it.
If I took enough photos, I would probably discover one or more common threads.

Once I had made and printed a good number of photos, I started to shift and select. To see which photos fit well together, complement each other or otherwise reinforce each other. I made a book of these, via Saal Digital. You can also view it, both as a book and as a video.

In November I was completely done with social media and took a break. No Instagram for a while, I had said goodbye to Facebook a year before. I still posted the photos on my own website, though. There you can see all the images, arranged by month. Some months I was more active than others. Or I made walks during which I encountered more interesting things. Sometimes I shot several images during one walk, sometimes nothing at all. And that was fine, if you consider that the goal is to learn why I take pictures.