This photograph is not a square peg but illustrates a few things I thought about this week. I had a one man exhibit open this past Thursday evening. An invitation to exhibit photographs arrived the previous Sunday. For those of you counting, that’s five days from invitation to opening. The only way this can happen is if you approach your work with an eye toward standardization. The Carpenter Portfolio had been previously published and exhibited about seven years ago and was matted to 16 x 20. I have an inventory of 16 x 20 frames and it was a simple matter of framing and handing the photos off to the exhibitors. Standardization of image size, paper and other physical attributes gives one the flexibility to increase your productivity. Increased productivity is a great thing if you are limited in the amount of time you have to devote to photography, or you are up against a tight deadline. The show will only be up a month or so, because I am beginning to prepare for another show which will require my 16 x 20 frames at the end of March.
The second purpose struck me when I mentioned this photograph was exhibited seven years ago. It’s an old image to me and it’s not part of my current work. If it’s new to you, it’s a new image from a new project. We see new “old” things all the time. Great literature, art, music and photography have all been created in the past and are continually “discovered” by those that are reading, seeing and listening for the first time. Visit the old projects and see what’s new.
The Carpenter Portfolio is on the second home page of my website. Link here. (Along with more projects you probably haven’t seen.)
Images from the Carpenter Portfolio were published in Black & White Photography (UK), issue 47, June 2005.
The article about the project, “Photographing the Not So Grand Landscape” was published in LensWork issue 51, February/March 2004.
Comments