There are already many books about photography, and almost none about how a photographic project gets made. The imbalance is not an accident. Technique is taught willingly, because it has rules that can be handed on, and aesthetics is written about willingly, because it allows fine sentences; but the stretch in between, the long opaque work that leads from a curiosity to a finished body of work, is left to anecdote and myth. Photographers describe the birth of their books as revelations, interviews celebrate the eye and say nothing about the table, and whoever is starting out is left with the impression that a project is something that happens to the chosen, not something you build. This book comes from the opposite suspicion: that there is a craft, made of recognisable phases and repeatable decisions, and that it is worth describing.
What the word project means here should be said straight away, because it is ambiguous. Not a commissioned job, which comes with a client and a deadline; not the single photograph, however good; and not the portfolio either, the collection of your best images, which is the opposite of a project. A project is a body of work held together by a question, built over time, headed for a form. It is the difference between having good photographs and having something to say; between photographing and making a work.
Most capable photographers never cross that threshold. Not for lack of talent, but because nobody has ever shown them that on the other side there is a process, and not a gift.
The process this book describes has the shape of a route, from the raw idea to the work going out into the world, and it follows the turns in the order they usually arrive: the curiosity everything starts from, its turning into a question, the research, the choice of distance from the subject, the declaration of the project, the method, the crises of the long haul, the changes of course, the encounter with other people, and then the long phase of form, the editing, the sequence, the words, the object, on to the statement, the release and the ending. The order is a useful fiction. In real practice the phases overlap, repeat, jump over one another; you discover your own question while editing, you change method halfway, you go back into the field after believing you had finished.
Every turn is told through a case, and the cases are not ornaments. They are how this book argues, because in a craft learnt by looking, an abstract decision stays mute until you see somebody take it, with that material, in those years, at that price. You will find here Soth's lists taped to the steering wheel, the six years Killip waited in front of a beach, Frank's twenty-seven thousand frames cut to eighty-three, the ravens Fukase moved a grief into, the gatefolds with which Kawada forces the reader to dig Hiroshima back up.
Two rules governed the writing, and they are worth declaring because they concern the reader's trust. The first: every quotation and every fact has been checked against sources, and the references sit at the back of each chapter, so that a reader can go back and verify. Where a source did not hold, the claim was dropped. The second: no photographer appears in more than one chapter. It is a constraint that cost some sacrifices, and it gives a small side history of photography, made of some fifty bodies of work walked through close up.
One warning, finally, against the wrong use of any book like this: method does not manufacture talent, and it guarantees nothing. It clears away the errors that kill projects before they can become good, and leaves the field open to what no handbook can supply. The rest begins where this book ends, in front of the thing you cannot stop looking at.