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31 - A Place for Your Project

A Place

Create a place to keep a project on which you're working.

The place could be a digital frame, shelf, box, folder, folder on your computer, or ?

Why?

It's good to be able to see what you've accomplished.

You can easily see what to.

You can easily share your efforts with others.

Shelf as Studio

The place for your work, perhaps only a shelf, can also energize your way-of-working.

Most photographers do photography in many places, not just in a studio setting.

A painter is more likely to paint only in a studio.

Reasons may include good light, ventilation, and the ability to drip and spill without remorse.

However, the most important reason may be that the space puts one in the mood for work.

While creativity may occur when daydreaming for a moment in an elevator, it's also encouraged by our history of creativity in a certain place.

A place for your work, even a shelf, may give you some of the creative benefits of a work space.

A Safe Place

Be sure to consider the permanency of the materials you're using.

Your work should be is stored and displayed archivally.

The dyes in CD and DVD discs fade, so files should be transferred onto new discs periodically.

And, migrate files from obsolete software and hardware to the new.

Text

Do caption or tag your photographs.

Roland Barthes wrote:

What is it that will be done away with when that person who can testify to this photograph is gone?

It is love-as-treasure which is going to disappear forever.1

When I sort through a box of abandoned photographs at a flea market, most have no writing on them.

I enjoy finding the ones with a name, an age, a date, location, and so forth.

A few words make the photograph more meaningful, to me, a stranger to the photograph.

What we easily remember about a file today may be less clear in a few years, and unknown to those who follow us.

Susan Sontag wrote:

A photograph is only a fragment, and with the passage of time its moorings become unstuck It drifts away into a soft abstract pastness, open to any kind of reading.2

Add captions to your photographs.

1 Barthes, R. (1981). Camera lucida: Reflections on photography. (R. Howard, Trans.). New York: Hill and Wang.

2 Sontag, S. (1977). On photography. London: Penguin Books.