Two weeks against pretty: the photographs I want to show

Two weeks ago I published a manifesto on this blog (read it here). Twelve rules. No chimping, no deleting, no taking the picture I knew would be good. The vow at the centre was that I would make photographs I didn’t want to show anyone, and publish them regardless. This is what actually happened.

The manifesto was designed to make street photography hard for me again. For the first few days it did. I stopped myself constantly. I’d see something, start composing it in my head, and the moment would pass. I lost real photographs to old habits.

Then it stopped hurting. By two-three days into the project, I had started to like the method, and by the end of the first week I liked the pictures.

That is, on the manifesto’s own terms, a problem. The vow was that I would make photographs I didn’t want to show. Instead I made photographs I am now picking out to print. The thing the rules were meant to dismantle, my taste, quietly reasserted itself, just in a different register.

The body did the work

What worked was the shooting. I held the camera at my hip and tried to predict what the 28mm took in. I didn’t compose. I didn’t wait for moments. I followed the rule «don’t take the picture you know will be good» by walking through situations and snapping, rather than stopping for the obvious frame. The body did the work. The brain stayed quieter than it usually does.

Some of the photographs I like most are ones I don’t remember taking. A man covering his eyes in front of a piece of street art with two huge eyes painted on it. Three silent-film posters staring out with three living faces in front of them. An Oslo S frame with six real faces and at least two more printed on a wall.

What the rules let through

I didn’t see those rhymes in the moment. I saw them at the desk, when I went through the cards. That is the part I keep turning over. The conscious mind didn’t compose those frames, but a more practised part of me did. The training was still on. The rules slowed down one habit and let another one run free.

So the freedom was real, but it wasn’t the freedom the manifesto promised. The freedom the manifesto promised was from my own taste. What I got instead was a faster way to use it.

Per the last line in the manifest, the project stands. The manifesto does not. I made a vow to dismantle my taste. My taste dismantled the vow. Eleven days in, I was enjoying myself too much to keep the rules, and I should not dress that up as wisdom. The freedom was real. The vow was not.

Anyways. Here are the pictures: