How I Develop a Personal Project

Identifying the themes you are attempting to explore

Chairs hang from a tree to secure them from flash flooding on Lake Huffer, a cattle Station in remote Queensland, Australia, 2017

Today I would like to discuss what it means to see and realize a photo project—whether it’s personal, assigned, or commissioned work. I touched on this idea in a previous newsletter about finding a metaphor with one photograph and in another about photographing surveillance, but I didn’t unpack it overtly. 

Over the weekend, I was looking through notes from workshops I’ve had with students over the last year, and there was a common thread to their questions: “How do I develop a specific project?” Let’s work out what you are making a narrative about, I told them. What are you exploring on a thematic level? I’d take out a sketch pad and start brainstorming; together, we’d come up with a group of words or phrases that would become the defining principle of the work.

Let’s play with a hypothetical example. Pretend I was assigned to make a series of photographs of a group of rock climbers in Utah for a magazine. For this project, the themes that come to mind are perseverance, camaraderie, strength, resilience, and environmental beauty. But they could also be isolation, fear, dominance over nature. 

Isla Hughes,19, a governess at New Year's Day party in New South Wales, 2017

There is no end to the words or phrases you can come up with. The premise is to make a list and then curate it so it aligns with the story you want to tell. In an advertising context, this list could be aligned with a brief or treatment. I make this list regardless of who I am working with.

I come from a photojournalist background where I respond to events and immediate phenomena; it took me years to develop my craft before I started reflecting on my work like this. I’d been dissatisfied with the way I was responding to stories as a photographer. When I looked at artists’ or photographers’ work I was drawn to, I wasn’t achieving the same cohesive, creative thesis.

The first time I developed a project by conceptualizing its themes was when I returned to Australia in 2014 to photograph the Australian bush. I started in the purpose-built mining town of Moranbah in Queensland. I was burnt out from all the international work I’d been doing and wanted to tell a story about my own country. I was interested in Moranbah because mining was an integral part of the shaping of modern Australia. Beyond mining, I had made a list of phenomena to cover, like I might do for a news assignment: country show (fair), youth, drought, workers, pig hunting, youth, small town, cattle station, Aboriginal community, mine, bachelor and spinster balls. Like much of my previous work, I was being more reactive than reflective and didn’t have a clear concept of the story I was trying to tell beyond the micro-events I witnessed. I felt frustrated.

An isolated storm moves across drought-affected land near Tuen in Queensland, 2018

One night I sat down at the Black Nugget pub in Moranbah, a single-story concrete Besser-block construction with a tin roof, and wrote a new list of words and themes that epitomized the Australia I was looking for: isolation, dominance over nature, colonial legacy, ‘The bush’, fleeting, remote, engulfing, remnants, centralization, displacement, mechanization, loss of innocence, modernization, decline, and environmental degradation. It was a shift in seeing small events as part of a larger context.

One of the next times I went to a bachelor and spinster ball, a regional dance where youth from surrounding farms and towns gather to party, I didn’t take pictures of the stage or the band or the spectacle of the event. I didn't take many photographs at all, but I found one photograph that depicted a loss of innocence.

A young man and woman kiss on the ground at a Bachelor and Spinster Ball at The Rock in New South Wales, 2019

Without a clear understanding of the archetypal themes you are attempting to explore, it's easy to get confused by your own imagery, or seduced by the power of a single image. I make this mistake regularly. But by stripping a project back to its core themes, you have creative guideposts. And when it comes time to edit, you have a thesis to hold every picture up to.

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