Wish #3: Take a photo a day for a month
March 10, 2010
Why? Throughout my final year at Uni, the photographs that I took were predominantly for the purpose of supporting stories in the Forge Press, the University of Sheffield‘s student-run newspaper. As a result, the types of images I found piling up on my laptop were not the sort I would normally choose to take. I loved having different stories to focus on and meet a whole new bunch of people, as well as a great excuse to put down my revision pen and pick up Colin and a spare battery before heading out the door to shoot something new. It was all lovely and dandy, although my pre-Forge creative stuff took a back seat as a result. My photogaphic mind became rather schizophrenic. This was fine, until after Uni when the demand for documentary and events photography came to an abrupt end along with my degree. What was left over was a somewhat poor excuse for a creative mind, with a bit of an identity crisis on top of that. I wanted to get back into my stride so I looked to Flickr for inspiration. Plenty of Flickr contacts and friends had been giving “365″ a shot: taking a photo a day for a whole year (occassionally self-portraits). I knew it was too ambitious a challenge for me and that I simply didn’t have the stamina, creative or otherwise, to sustain something quite so prolongued. Instead, I decided to do it for a month and Project 31 was born.
The beginning of the next month came and went, and the next, and over time the idea fizzled out. Aha, Christmas time – the perfect occassion for photographs – except that my family’s spirit was not so festive and a lot of troubles around that time knocked the art out of me. The next big thing was New Year. Yes, I would start the project then and begin the year with a fresh mind, clear head and all that.
January 1st 2010: Wallpapering
January 1st was a Friday and, with a foggy-not-fresh champagne head, I was woken up by the sound of hoovering. It seems my father had taken up the next instalment in a series of DIY tasks. One by one, yucky floral wallpaper strips filled his bedroom walls. He (and the wallpaper) didn’t make a good model, so the pasting brush had to do. The concept of “Project 31” was to capture an image that summarised something unique to each day and write a few sentences about it. A daily snapshot through my eyes began to build up and I thought it warranted its own Set on my Flickr photostream.
The photographs are far from being masterpieces or particularly captivating but I enjoyed having a reason to take photographs again. January was a good month, and February an even better one, for photographs. Long may the creative momentum last.
