Focus and insight - for a stronger visual story

For some years I have been taking pictures rather randomly, be it on trips to foreign countries or at home in nature, in the streets etc. This is probably how most of us start getting into photography. There can be really good shots and when you travel abroad, your topic is of course the specific country. But even that is a rather large and vague notion – is it about landscape, about the people, about street life? Very often, when looking at the number of pictures after one of my trips it felt rather unspecific and random.

That is where what I call “project photography” comes in. The idea is that you choose a topic, a focus before you start going out and pressing the shutter-release button randomly. Working on a topic or a series leads to a more conscious and intentional way of looking at your surroundings and taking pictures. For me, this was the next step in my personal development as a photographer. It was when I started joining photographic classes that are conceived to bring together different people, each of them working on their own long-term project. The series Alexandrowka is the first result of that approach. I worked on it for more than a year, getting to know the people of that UNESCO heritage site in Potsdam and shooting three families in their houses.

I have also tried to apply this approach when travelling: in Kyrgyzstan I took only pictures of my hike in the mountains from yurt to yurt, nothing else. To me this series called Jailoo has a clear focus and is more comprehensive than if I had added some pictures of the capital Bishkek. The same goes for my trip to Sweden last year which included a tour with sled dogs, but I also spent some days in Stockholm and Norrköping visiting friends. From the beginning, I decided that I wanted the visual result of this trip to be a series with the dogs. I chose black and white which fitted best for the surroundings and I took only my small camera (Fuji X100) with me since the big one would not be very handy on the moving sled. What sound like a restriction is actually good for the creative process because you do not concentrate on the gear, but on your subject matter with the given means. The result is one of my favourite travel series Tugline which made it to the national photography exhibition this spring in Olomouc/Czech Republic.

Dive deeper - visually and personally

What is also great about working on a certain topic apart from the photography aspect, is the fact that you have to get acquainted with your theme as much as possible. Read books, listen to people’s stories, dive into the history etc. So, in the worst case, even if you cannot put together a good series of pictures or if your photography will never be exhibited, you have broadened your horizon and learnt a lot of new things about your subject, met new people.

In my ongoing project “Vltava” (Moldau river) I felt like making a series about the river’s appearance today which is far from the times, when Smetana wrote his symphonic poem “My homeland” 150 years ago.

As the longest river in the Czech Republic, originating in the Bavarian and Bohemian forests on both sides of the border, the Vltava is a national myth. Since then, however, a cascade of nine dams has been build, cutting the river into several sections and thus making it not navigable any more upstream from Prague. This has also led to several large reservoirs used for recreation, water management and energy production. I started diving into the history, which, by the way, also explains where the Czech greeting Ahoj comes from - quite a surprise in a land-locked country - and the more you dig, the more you find… I learnt about the floating of wood by rafts, a photographer in Český Krumlov whose archives give a sound overview of how the river looked like one hundred years ago, about ancient rules for passing through weirs, about fish and floods. I went to the great exhibition at the Prague Castle about the history of the Vltava, which brings together many aspects of the river’s history and its representation in art.

And I travelled along the river throughout the year, getting to know many new places, bridges, villages - places I would not have gone to otherwise. In a nutshell, I discovered so many things I would not be aware of, had it not been for this photography project.

What will come out of it? We will see....

But even now I have already learnt so much from it.

Stay curious, dive deeper and get your pictures out !

Have a lovely autumn,

Petra