I went back through the Fifty Project as part of the reformatting of my web site. (What? You haven’t seen the new redesign? Click on over to my home page and take a look. I’ll wait right here while you check it out.) I had a birthday a couple of weeks ago and I remembered considered doing a “Sixty” Project to celebrate that milestone. After careful consideration, I figured that wouldn’t be the best idea.
The Fifty Project was a watershed project because it pushed me into the (then) new world of digital presentation. It was the foundation for all the web and folio projects since. It was the end of the era of the individual print. I was not ready to commit completely to the folio as a final product, so “Fifty” was a compilation of “greatest hits” in an exploratory presentation.
A greatest hits compilation at Sixty would be completely different because I really don’t deal in single image art any more. I still (two years later) don’t even know how to deal with the concept of “greatest hits” in terms of folios, so I had to let it pass. Maybe by the time I do my “Fifty Years of Photography” project, (with apologies to all Brett Weston fans) I will have figured out how to share the best of my folios – or maybe whatever medium I will be using in the future.
This post was nine years ago. Now it’s time to start my “Fifty Years of Photography” book so I can join the club. Go ahead and google Fifty Years of Photography and see how many results you get. After a lot of thought and discussion with photo buddy Brooks Jensen, I decided that the best way to get this milestone exhibit out into the world was to create a series of PDF publications (just as I have on my web site) over the next year or two with each PDF covering one of the five decades. I’ll let you know when this project is going to start.