A Thousand Forks in the Road

A Thousand Forks in the Road

There was a time in my life when making a photograph was a relatively simple thing in so much that I had only one option — I could make a black and white gelatin silver print. Period. I never did learn platinum/palladium printing; I never worked in color; multi-projector slide shows were considerably outside my budget; and audio and video were for broadcast professionals.

How far we've come in just a few years. Because of the technological advances available to all of us, I now commonly work in prints, multimedia PDFs, video, book publication, publications for iPads and other digital devices, and most recently in artist-made chapbooks. Hooray for the technology — but what complicated layer of decision-making this has added to my creative life.

I'm currently working on, roughly, a hundred different photographic projects. This is not an exaggeration. Some I am just beginning, a few I'm near the end, and a huge pile in the middle are stuck because I'm having a hard time deciding which medium I will use for its completion. This has grown into a thoroughly unexpected sticking point in my creative process.

For example, with any given project I can easily see it as a series of black and white prints. That's easy, I've done it my entire life. But I can also see it completed as one of these other, newer media. Anything that could become a stack of prints could just as easily become a PDF, a video, a slideshow, and iPad app — or all of the above! Essentially, the technology has made it easier to finish an image (dodging, burning, etc.), but far more difficult to finish a project.

I shouldn't complain. In spite of the fact that finishing the project is become more complicated, I have no doubt that I'm producing the best artwork of my life. I suspect what's missing is a solution for this decision-making process for which I am not prepared nor am I trained.

I don't ever remember the discussion of media options cropping up in a workshop in my youth. What I wouldn't give to trade a few of those long-lost Zone System tutorial hours for a little help in how to think through the forest of possibilities that are the beginnings of every project in today's world.

Comments

[J Riley Stewart]

Was it Yogi Berra who said "..when you find a fork in the road, take it.?" But when there are a thousand forks, taking any of them could / will cause you to go in circles, getting nothing done. And the forks you mention in the article only relate to creative forks... there are also marketing forks, sales forks, accounting forks, etc. It's overwhelming sometimes. As a mature artist, I've learned to evaluate each and every fork I'm confronted with, take those I really WANT to take, and let the others grow over with grass. I know those forks will be available to me in the future, if I ever choose to take them. What would be great is better information that would help us make the decision to take a particular fork (or not). Do PDF books sell? Do videos do anything except entertain (i.e., do they actually drive traffic to my sales site?) I don't know, but it would certainly be useful information to know which forks are productive and which aren't so much. After all, with a thousands forks to explore, trial and error is not an option, for me at least-- I don't have that many years left.

[Godfrey]

I have found I don't have the energy, the mental quiet, the time, etc, to deal with such a bewildering decision tree. I simply limit what decisions I'm going to make by arbitrarily cutting through to just a couple of simple goals:

- I like prints, so I always want to make a print. My prints nowadays are often card-sized rather than gigunda things that cover a wall.

- I like a short slide show, so I always think in terms of "what eight to twenty images makes a good slide show, and what music fits them."

- I like books, so I always think "hmm, have i got enough material to sustain a full book length work?" Thinking of which, I better get off my butt and start putting together the book I've been laying out in my head since August. The photos are (mostly) all done ... ;-)

I no longer care about accounting, profitability, saleability, etc, because I no longer think of doing photography as an income generating exercise. I think of it as an expressive enterprise and consider it more important to be satisfying to me and to the audience that follows my work.

Simplicity.