What you never
stop looking at

In 1999 Alec Soth starts driving along the Mississippi with scraps of paper taped to the steering wheel. They are lists. One of them reads, more or less: beards, birdwatchers, mushroom hunters, men-only retreats, after the rain, figures seen from behind, suitcases, tall people, thin if possible, targets, tents, treehouses. There is no thesis, no title, no statement to send to a publisher. There is a man of thirty who has written down the things that turn his head while he drives, and who has decided to trust that list more than his own intentions. Sleeping by the Mississippi would come out in 2004 and become one of the most influential photobooks of its time. But it is worth stopping for a moment before the book, and even before the river. The river, Soth would tell Aaron Schuman in an interview for SeeSaw Magazine that same year, worked as a route: a geographical pretext for holding the encounters together, a thread to string the pearls on.

The substance was in the lists, and a list describes an appetite before it describes a subject. Nobody builds a career on mushroom hunters. Those words are symptoms. They are the faithful transcription of curiosity in its raw state, before anyone combs it into something presentable. The method had a flaw too, and Soth has admitted it with the frankness of someone who has come out the other side. He stopped the car every time something struck him, and he noticed that the first things to strike him were often clichés: images that resembled other photographers' work, pictures already made by somebody else and asking only to be made again. Raw curiosity arrives encrusted with other people's images. Part of the work of the following months is scraping off that crust to find out what, in the attraction, is genuinely ours. But without the attraction there is nothing to scrape. The list taped to the steering wheel remains the most honest document a photographer can produce about himself, precisely because it gets written while there is still nothing to defend.

The subject before the mediumYou are not a photographer because you are interested in photography

There is a misunderstanding worth clearing away at once, and nobody has put it better than David Hurn, the Magnum photographer, in his conversations with the photography historian Bill Jay, published in 1997 as On Being a Photographer. You are not a photographer because you are interested in photography, Hurn says. Plenty of people are drawn to photography in a vague way: by the apparently adventurous lives of famous photographers, by cameras as beautiful functional objects, by the ritual of the darkroom, by the person they might become if only they made certain pictures. None of these interests, however pleasant, produces a photographer. Photography, Hurn concludes, is a vehicle for conveying a passion for something else. The medium is not the end.

Jay, for his part, knew exactly what his interlocutor was talking about, because he had been through it himself. As a young man, still in his twenties, he had shown Hurn his own photographs, the fruit of more than seven years of trying to become a photographer. Hurn took about thirty seconds to leaf through the lot and dismissed them as boring. Jay tells the story without resentment, with gratitude even, because that brutal verdict taught him something seven years of work had not: he was struggling to become a photographer like other photographers, and the struggle itself was the problem. His pictures were boring because he, standing in front of the subjects he was photographing, was bored. He had learnt everything about photography except the reason for doing it.

The episode is instructive because it turns the usual diagnosis on its head. When a body of work does not work, the first reflex is to look for the fault in the technique, the composition, the light, and to double down on study. Jay had studied for seven years. The flaw lay further upstream, in a place courses do not reach: the absence of any necessary bond between the person photographing and the thing photographed. It is a statement that sounds obvious until you apply it to yourself. Then it changes weight. Because most people looking for an idea for a project are in fact looking for an idea that will let them take photographs, which is the right movement in reverse: a subject that justifies the desire to photograph, instead of a desire that makes photographing inevitable. The difference is visible to the naked eye in the results. Projects born to keep the camera busy all have the same illness: they are photographically competent and humanly empty. You can tell that the author looked at the subject just long enough to photograph it, and not a minute longer.

The Winogrand objectionThe case that seems to disprove the rule, and confirms it

It is worth considering the case that appears to contradict Hurn and in fact bears him out. Garry Winogrand claimed that he photographed to find out what things look like photographed. The line is documented: he discusses it himself in the interview with Barbaralee Diamonstein published in 1982 in Visions and Images, where the interviewer puts it back to him as the sentence he had by then become identified with. It is often quoted as the manifesto of a photography whose subject is itself, the medium looking in the mirror. But an hour spent with Winogrand's contact sheets is enough to see that his appetite lay entirely outside the medium: crowds, women, zoo animals behaving like people, airports, American bodies in American public space. Thirty years spent burning film on the same four or five themes, with a persistence no theory of the medium can explain and only hunger can.

Winogrand himself, as it happens, had supplied the key to reading that hunger. He thought of the photographer as a collector of fragments of America chosen by taste: someone who looks at the world and decides what he wants to collect, including in the frame what he wants to keep and excluding the rest, letting the look of the photograph settle itself. The observation, taken up in the catalogue of the major retrospective organised by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2013, is worth more than a good many treatises. The collector is the exact figure of organised curiosity: someone who cannot fully explain why he accumulates shells or railway timetables, but who recognises the missing piece at first sight. Coming from the man who photographed America for thirty years with unequalled voracity, the formula turns out to be a self-portrait: he was saying that he knew perfectly well what he wanted to collect, and that photographing was his way of checking whether the piece, once inside the frame, was worth the collection. Even the most instinctive of photographers obeys a hunger that already has its criteria before the shutter.

The notebookQuestioning the teaspoons

Curiosity, then. The word is worn out, and some weight needs putting back into it. What is meant here is not the polite interest people declare in their statements, the one that has everybody interested in people, in light, in stories. It is something less voluntary and less noble: the thing your head turns towards on its own. On this point Hurn and Jay give the humblest and most serious piece of advice in the whole literature of the trade: keep a notebook, and in the empty moments write down what genuinely interests you. What makes you slow down without anyone asking you to. What you talk about at dinner when nobody has asked. The advice deserves to be taken literally, and to see how far it reaches it helps to step outside photography for a moment. In 1973 Georges Perec, in a short text called Approaches to What?, coined the word infra-ordinary for everything that happens when nothing happens: the background noise of existence, what is so common that it becomes invisible.

The newspapers, he observes, only ever talk about the trains that derail; nobody says anything about the trains that arrive, and yet that is where life goes past. And he proposes a programme that sounds like a joke and is a method: question your teaspoons. Describe your street, your building, the contents of your pockets, until the familiar turns strange again. The following year he puts it into practice: in October 1974 he sits for three days in the place Saint-Sulpice in Paris, changing café and vantage point now and then, and notes down everything that goes by. The number 96 buses, the pigeons taking off all at once, the shopping bags, a man who looks like an actor. Out of it comes a small book, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, which is one of the most exact descriptions ever written of what it means to look at something seriously.

Perec had no camera, and that is exactly why his experiment tells photographers something photographers find hard to tell themselves. The place Saint-Sulpice list shows that attention is a practice, with its dead time, its tiredness, its diminishing returns and its sudden openings. On the second day Perec notes fewer buses and more shades of difference: the act of recording is changing him. The same thing happens to a photographer's notebook kept with any consistency. The first pages list predictable subjects, the ones we think we ought to find interesting. Around the thirtieth page the real recurrences begin to surface, and they rarely match the image we have of ourselves. A person believes he is drawn to the great themes and discovers that what he keeps writing down is courtyards, closed shutters, men waiting. The list does not lie. It has another property too, one Perec knew well and one that makes it the natural literary form of curiosity: it does not rank. It simply accumulates, putting mushroom hunters next to treehouses without deciding which matters more. The hierarchies will come, and they will be the project. The list is what exists before, and a photographer who does not yet know what he is looking for would do well to distrust any tidier instrument.

The daily practiceRinko Kawauchi: accumulate, then reread

Soth's lists organise curiosity before departure. The opposite movement also exists, and its clearest demonstration is Japanese. In 2001 Rinko Kawauchi, twenty-nine years old, made her debut by publishing three photobooks at once: Utatane, Hanabi, Hanako. The following year two of them, Utatane and Hanabi, won her the Kimura Ihei Award, the most important Japanese prize for an emerging photographer. Utatane means a doze, a nap: the state in which the day's images float back up without order, and Kawauchi has said that it was in exactly that state that certain visual memories revealed themselves to her as part of who she was. Inside there are droplets, insects, fireworks, a spoonful of tapioca, the carp in a pond: the repertoire of a person who photographs whatever passes in front of her every day, with a sensibility critics have traced back to Shinto, where every thing possesses a spirit and therefore no subject is too small.

Ten years later, in 2011, Aperture published Illuminance, her first book to appear outside Japan: 176 photographs chosen from fifteen years of work. That publishing detail deserves a pause, because it contains an entire method. Fifteen years of photographs made without the book that would eventually take them in. Kawauchi does not set out to photograph a project: she photographs, daily, the way other people keep a diary, and the projects emerge afterwards, by selection, out of a flow that never stops. Even the title of her first book, read properly, was a poetics dressed up as an ordinary word.

Utatane names that half-sleeping state in which the images of the day float back up without order and without hierarchy, and Kawauchi has said that it was there, on the threshold of sleep, that certain visual memories revealed themselves to her: she realised they had become part of her without her knowing. It is a clinical description of how curiosity works when nobody is directing it, and the fact that a photographer chose to give her first book that name says how deliberately she had decided to trust that involuntary sieve. The project, in her case, is an act of reading her own archive rather than a production plan. Soth writes the list and then leaves; Kawauchi accumulates and then rereads. They are the two directions of the same principle: in both cases the practice of looking comes before the project and feeds it, never the other way round. Anyone waiting to have the project before they start looking has reversed the order of operations, and usually never starts at all.

The limit caseVivian Maier, where the principle breaks

Finally there is a figure who carries this principle to the point where it breaks, which is why she is worth looking at closely. Vivian Maier was born in New York in 1926, spent part of her childhood in France, and from the post-war years worked for some forty years as a nanny, mostly in the well-off suburbs of Chicago. On her days off she walked the city with a Rolleiflex held at chest height and photographed: children, the rich outside the department stores, the poor on the corners, herself reflected in shop windows. Over a lifetime she accumulated an enormous archive, more than a hundred thousand negatives in the best-known portion alone, and thousands of rolls she never even developed, for lack of money and perhaps for lack of need. She showed the work to nobody. In 2007, by which time she was elderly and in difficulty, the contents of her storage locker were auctioned off over unpaid rent. A young estate agent named John Maloof, looking for period photographs for a local history book, bought a box of negatives for a few hundred dollars. By the time he understood what he was holding and tried to find the author, all he found was an obituary: Maier died in April 2009, poor, shortly before the world learnt her name. The recognition came entirely after her death: the media clamour at the end of 2010, the exhibitions, the books, and in 2013 the documentary Finding Vivian Maier.

The temptation, faced with this story, is the fairy tale: the secret genius, the treasure in the cardboard box. Resisting the fairy tale is what lets you see what the story actually teaches anyone who wants to build a project. And it helps to start with the material details, which are less romantic and more instructive. The contents of the locker did not go to a single buyer: the lots were split, and the archive of a whole life scattered into several pairs of hands. Maloof gathered the largest part, around a hundred thousand negatives, more than three thousand prints, hundreds of rolls of film, eight-millimetre home movies and even audio recordings; a second collector, Jeffrey Goldstein, put together some nineteen thousand negatives; a third, Ron Slattery, carried off more than a thousand rolls from the auction. A whole woman, divided in three like a bankrupt estate. In the years that followed, that dispersal produced lawsuits, disputes over rights, and academic questions about who gets to decide what, when it comes to the work of a person who left no instructions. Every Maier exhibition we see is the result of an edit she never authorised, carried out on a fraction of a dismembered archive, according to the taste of men who bought at auction the material right to choose it.

Maier possessed, to an extreme degree, everything discussed so far: non-negotiable curiosity, daily practice, loyalty to her own subjects sustained across decades. She lacked, or refused, one thing only: the organising of that looking into a form addressed to someone. Her books exist, but other people edited them. Her exhibitions exist, but other people curated them. The selections, the sequences, the titles, even the spelling of her surname, which she varied perhaps to throw people off: all of it was decided afterwards, by people who never met her, and scholars still argue over whether this public Maier resembles the photographer she would have wanted to be, assuming she wanted to be one at all. We will not find out. What can be said with certainty is the difference her case makes visible: between looking and letting yourself be read, between the archive and the work. A project is the act by which a way of seeing agrees to address somebody, with everything that involves: choosing, excluding, exposing yourself to being misunderstood. Curiosity on its own produces archives. It is projects that produce interlocutors, and the interlocutors, in Maier's case, arrived when she could no longer answer back.

The involuntary archiveThe small Maier we all carry in our pocket

Almost all of us, today, own a small Maier, and it is the camera roll on our phone. Thousands of images made with no ambition, no audience and no authorial poses: car parks photographed to find the car again, restaurant blackboards, the cat, a crack in a wall that for some reason deserved it. In among this administrative noise, though, something else has been settling for years: the photographs made for no reason at all, the ones taken because the hand moved before the judgement did. It is the involuntary archive of our obsessions, compiled by the person least suspected of strategy, which is us in the moments when we were not being photographers. I have an incredible one, for instance, of my own feet while sitting on the lavatory, all around the world. It is unlikely to produce the exhibition that changes the history of photography.

The fact remains that, for some reason, I keep photographing those feet. Anyone looking for their subject would do well to give an evening to this archive, treating it the way they would treat a stranger's work. Scroll through it fast, as an outsider, counting the recurrences: the motifs that come back, the distances that come back, the times of day that come back. The exercise beats the notebook on one precise point, because the notebook records what we think we are noticing, while the camera roll records what the hand actually did, and when the two testimonies diverge, believe the hand. What comes back, comes back for a reason. More than one real project starts from one of those recurrences, taken seriously and questioned the way Perec questioned his teaspoons. Brilliant ideas arrived at from a desk usually start something else: a quote for new equipment.

Where ideas come fromThe outside supply and the inner trigger

At this point it is worth stopping on the question that blocks beginners before any method does: where do you fish for ideas. The blank page is the first real obstacle, and it is not what it looks like. It gets described as laziness or a shortage of ideas, and almost always it is something else: not knowing where to look. Someone has studied the technique, can expose and print, and freezes at the simplest question of all, which is what the work will be about. The misunderstanding lies in believing that the idea arrives by inspiration, like a flash of lightning; and since the lightning does not come, the conclusion is that there is nothing to say, when all that is missing is a way of going out to look.

On where ideas are fished from I have come to a definite conviction, and it starts from a distinction. There is a first way, and it is curiosity kept in training: reading books and newspapers, watching films, crossing into the other arts, staying informed, feeding the eyes continuously. It is the work of laying in supplies, indispensable, and anyone who skips it runs dry soon enough. But curiosity on its own fills a warehouse; it does not light a project. I am convinced that the ideas capable of holding up for years come from somewhere else: from something that moves us inside, something we feel is ours by life or by thought. And that inside has more than one source. There is what we have lived, direct experience asking to be understood. There is what attracts us without our being able to say why, and which only reveals its connection to us when we dig, because attraction almost always comes before its explanation. And there is context, the environment we grew up in and the one we are in now: it is that, more than we like to admit, which pushes us towards certain stories and not others, the social, demographic, ethical and political questions of the place and the time we happen to have been given. A person believes he is choosing his subject out of personal inclination, and in large part the world he happens to be standing in is choosing it for him.

The two things, the outside supply and the inner trigger, are not mutually exclusive; they work together. Curiosity provides the forms, the possible images, the ways other people have already looked; but the trigger, the reason why that form and not another one is calling us, comes from within. An idea fished only out of the world, touching nothing of our own, produces work that is correct and cold, the kind you admire and forget. An idea born out of what belongs to us, on the other hand, even while it is still raw, has the push it needs to carry the work through to the end. Recognising where it comes from takes nothing away from the idea: it makes it more honest, because a project that knows where it was born, out of a life, an obsession or an environment, is a project that can answer the hardest question of all, which is why me, and why now. Underneath all this there is a condition worth stating outright, because it holds up the whole argument. You cannot be a photographer without looking at photography.

But looking, here, does not mean leafing through: it means feeding on it, understanding the reason behind a project, its development, its language. Every writer, before being a writer, is a great reader. In photography exactly the same holds, and it is not an elegant metaphor: it is the starting condition. Visual culture, today, is not at its historical peak, but it would be ungenerous to read that as a moral decline. It is more like an almost natural evolution. We are bombarded with such a quantity of images that knowing them all has become impossible, it would simply be too much; and most of them are made to be read in an instant, consumed and forgotten. This is where the tension runs through anyone who wants to make a serious project: photography that builds something of consequence needs the opposite, time and slowness. It runs against the current of the environment it is born in. Anyone working on a real project is, knowingly or not, rowing against the speed of their own time.

The question of timeCuriosity comes first

What remains to be said concerns time, which is perhaps the real dividing line between curiosity and its substitutes. A serious photographic project asks for the time it takes to go deep, and that time is not decided at a desk: sometimes it is months, often years. Soth travelled the Mississippi in several stretches between 1999 and 2002; Illuminance distils fifteen years; Maier walked for forty. Returns to the same subject, photographs that fail, days when nothing happens, enthusiasm that drops and has to be rebuilt. No brilliant idea withstands that kind of wear. A brilliant idea is a match: useful for lighting, useless for heating. What holds up over time is the underlying curiosity, the one that was there before the project and will be there after, because it does not depend on the project. This is why the right opening question is not "what project could I do?" but "what was I already looking at, before I asked myself the question?". The first produces candidates. The second produces witnesses.

The method, in the end, is almost offensively simple: a notebook kept the way Perec kept his, an evening spent in front of your own archive, the honesty to read what is written there and the humility to accept that your real subjects are less prestigious than the ones you dreamed of. Jay had to be told his photographs were boring before he began asking himself what actually interested him. Better to ask the question earlier, while the verdict costs less. A photographic project is a curiosity that has agreed to organise itself. Curiosity comes first. The organising, fortunately, can be learnt.

The chapter in 1 minute

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