Yesterday I spent the afternoon making photographs in Pasadena. I was getting familiar with the new Fujifilm X100F that I had purchased to replace the X100S I had been using as my primary camera for the past 5 years.
It was while walking through the streets that I spotted this shopping cart discarded in a parking lot. It reminded me of an assignment I had given myself years ago where I challenged myself to photograph nothing but shopping carts for the week.
I did that not because I have a fixation for them, but rather I had gotten frustrated with my photography. At the time, I was struggling with finding time to make images and even when I did, I felt that I was just endlessly repeating myself. I was taking pictures, but I wasn’t producing photographs that excited me or seemed new to me. I could certainly make a good picture, but I often felt that I had made the same image countless times before. I felt stuck.
So for a year I gave myself different assignments. I would choose one visual element and shoot that exclusively whenever I had the opportunity to make photographs. Some weeks, I focused on a color while another week I looked for a shape. At first, the assignment was fairly obvious but over time, I found myself trying to choose more challenging subject matter.
When the idea for shopping carts first popped into my head, I immediately dismissed it. I sure as hell wasn’t going to spend what little time that I had making photographs of shopping carts. But I took my resistance as a sign. If I was so averse to doing it, it was likely the exact thing that I should be doing. So, I reluctantly began my week thinking that this was one of the stupidest ideas I’d come up with.
Then I began to see shopping carts everywhere. Whether I was walking down the street or driving in my car, I would spot them. And each time I stopped to photograph them, I challenged myself to try and make an interesting photograph. I didn’t simply want to document its existence. Instead, I wanted to see whether I could come up with a photograph that was interesting to look at regardless of how mundane the subject matter was.
I began to examine a shopping cart in terms of light and shape but also how it related to the environment it was in. I paid attention to how light and shadow and color played a role in how I experienced it. With each image, I kept pushing further and further my ability to make the less than obvious choices.
By the end of the week, I was having a wonderful time photographing shopping carts. I certainly wouldn’t have thought that when I began the assignment. What propelled me forward was that I was challenging the way I saw the world not only through the camera but through my eyes. I realized that I too often disregard potential subject matter because they were ordinary and familiar. It wasn’t until I was forced to reconsider them in a visual and graphic way that I discovered a new and exciting way of seeing.
If you are struggling in a similar way, I recommend finding some mundane and ordinary subject matter to focus on for the week. I think that you’ll find as I did that that the challenge of making photographs of the ordinary will help you to learn the skills needed to make the mundane extraordinary.
Elinor Carucci (born 1971) is an Israeli American photographer and educator living in New York City. She is noted for her intimate portraits of her family's lives.[2][3][4] She has published four monographs: Closer (2002), Diary of a Dancer (2005), Mother (2013), and Midlife (2019). She teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Shortly after RBG’s passing in September 2020, Time magazine commissioned Carucci to write a commemorative piece on the late justice, focused on the stories behind her legendary collars.
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Michael Honegger is a visual artist born in Germany with a B.A. in History & Spanish from Duke University, a M.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, and a Professional Certificate in Visual Arts from Maine Media College. His practice as a fine art and documentary photographer explores the performative nature of self-portraiture, the complexities of memory and family, and an investigation of the ironies of American culture with an expatriate’s eye. His most recent book is The Need to Know.
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He is fascinated by how people interact with the places they inhabit, particularly in their homes and on the streets. He has been capturing images of both for decades. American Portraits (in 3D) are a unique series of environmental portraits that are rendered in three dimension using his own approach for showcasing these images.
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Sandy Sugawara and Catiana Garcia Kilroy collaborate on a book project titled Show Me the Way Home. It is an immersive, visual journey through the incarceration camps that held 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War 2. Sugawara and Kilroy tell the story of each camp through original and archival photographs, personal stories, and government documents. It’s a frightening tale of a society that failed to protect its vulnerable.
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Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind.