Project, series or singles?

To be a serious photographer, do you need a project? Or rather, if you haven’t taken pictures for a personal project, are you even a proper photographer? And what constitutes a project? People who know say that “a project is a set of tasks that must be completed in order to arrive at a particular goal or outcome.” So what’s the goal of a photographic project?

I could see how you could form a project around exploring or explaining something, but I wonder if some of what we call projects are actually collections? I could decide to take pictures of people’s knees or yellow tractors for example, but what I’d get is a themed set. What would the goal be, unless it was to gather every example into a complete collection?

David Hurn had something to say about projects. If he wanted to create a piece of work he would start with research. From this you would make a series of headings of subjects you want to cover. Then you shoot them. And then you check your results and reshoot as necessary. Then you know when you are done. This is much more like telling a story, which has structure and an end, than a collection of words. So if I did want to take pictures of yellow tractors, I’d have to start with why? What is it I want to say or show? Perhaps it would be why there are yellow tractors (because green ones would get lost, or cows can’t see red, or just that yellow things float). Then I might have a series of things within this that I could show, such as making them, selling them, who chooses them, what they excel at and so on. And I’m off! I have the makings of a project that will tell a story. What I won’t have is a set of pictures of yellow tractors. What I could have, if I had talent, would be something like the fantastic essays and reportage that used to appear in news magazines.

Not yellow

Then there is the series of pictures. It feels to me that this is either a small collection (some yellow tractors, not all) or has a narrative that means they must be in a certain order. Or perhaps it’s a book or exhibition? An exhibition may have a theme, even if it’s stuff I did last year, and is limited in size. So it’s a series. I’ve seen plenty of books of pictures that are collections with a tenuous theme, and some with a strong theme. But they often seem to be ‘and this one, and this one, and here’s another’. I’ve got a great book of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s pictures that contains some fantastic pictures of people and some dull landscapes. I’ve another book by someone who shall be nameless that is a series of ugly random pictures (and not even Lomo) and pretentious art-speak. The apparent theme of this one is ‘look at me, I’ve got a book’. But, snide aside, collections can be great. Every exhibition you see will be a collection of some sort. So perhaps most of what we call projects are actually the collation of a set of images into a collection?

Not a tractor

So if a set of pictures has a story it’s a project, and if it has a theme it’s a series or a collection. What about single pictures? Are they just a collection without a theme? Or just good single pictures that have nothing in common? If they are in a gallery then perhaps the hope is that you’ll find one you like enough to buy.

For myself, I wish I could tell a story. The best I could offer would be series of themed pictures (fish I have known might be one). I have quite a few single pictures that I like but have no link or theme. Perhaps that’s what makes me the (happy) amateur I am: I have nothing to tell the world about. Other than chuntering here of course, but that’s hardly the world (although with grateful thanks to both my readers). Anyway – a question to the class: are most projects actually a series or collection? And does calling a series a project detract from the point of a project: that it has a goal?