The Saga of My First Street Photography Project - Nashville Playing
The idea of starting a street photography project came to me because of a rather random set of thoughts.
1. It became fairly clear to me that I was never going to consistently produce brilliant individual street photography images. That train had left the station.
2. Single images tell small stories. Projects tell big stories. I possibly have some skills that might lend themselves to telling a big story.
3. The whole can be greater than the sum of the parts.
I began to think that I could piece together medium good single images to make a project that is a step up from medium good. I will aim for good good. The more I thought about it, the better the idea seemed to be. My busy brain was ready for some new challenges. Certainly everything about developing a project was going to be challenging.
I might have even been a bit of prescient. For years, street photography opportunities for me have come because of travel. As I observed rather cheekily in a blog, I am event photographer. Travel is the event. But as 2020 started, I sensed, rather eerily now that I think back on it, that there was going to be a change in how much I traveled. Stepping up my street photography game in Nashville was going to be a requirement for me to credibly continue calling myself a street photographer. What better way to motivate myself than to have a hometown project?
The first step in a project is choosing a theme. There are a lot of ways to do that. You can look through your collections of pictures for ideas. In fact, you can practice making a project with images you already have. Perhaps you have an aesthetic like a preference for shadows or silhouettes that could be the theme. You can document a location or a culture. You can choose a project that could have social impact. Your value set like a passion for protecting the environment or a desire for social justice can create a theme. I took the easy path and chose the most obvious and accessible theme possible. Nashville is known as the Music City so I decided to have music as the theme.
Music and musicians are everywhere in Nashville. If you need to pass time waiting for a departure at the airport, you can listen to live music. For a significant portion of the year we have almost non-stop festivals, fairs, music events and markets that feature, you guessed it, live music. We have live music at a Taco Bell, for heavens sake. It did strike me that a music theme could be unbearably trite. I finally settled on the theme, Nashville Playing. It is about our life when there is music. Music is everywhere. I have never seen anything like it.
Obviously if you study how to do a street photography project, it will likely improve your project, especially the first one. I do not do a lot of advance planning in my old age, so I more or less forged ahead. However, as I have gotten more interested in projects, I have started to spend my money on books created by street photographers. Studying the projects and work of other photographers probably gives me more bang for the buck than new equipment would. If you are considering a project, you might want to start the studying a little soon than I did.
I did have an elegant plan to get the project started. I had been attending Nashville events since I had moved to the area, so I had some pictures in my Nashville collection that represented both the joy and the volume of musical opportunities that we have. In 2020, I would go to every conceivable event where music was going to be played. We all know that did not happen. Projects can morph and mine had to morph even before it got started. It was not clear it could even get started.
In October, ironically as we were moving into the height of Covid, ready or not, it was time to launch the project. There were no city or county events, so Nashville’s 5 block, more or less, entertainment district centered around Broadway was the only game in town. It is not uncommon for a project to document small area. Certainly, that adds some challenges like how to get new, fresh images week after week, but challenge is relative when you are in the middle of a pandemic.
In next week’s blog I will tell you how the project has gone in the first 6 months. I have learned a lot.