What's in a personal project?
This is a picture of my first important personal project holding my second.
A personal project can be so many things. It can be a literal personal project about you and your life. Or it can be a project about something close to your heart and values.
Photography is not easy. It can certainly seem easy, but it is also one of those things that the more you know the more you realise you have yet to learn. So it will never be easy because there is always more to know.
Personal projects for me have been a safe space to both find my balance and work on something long-term. When I work long-term my work changes, and because the project becomes more and more familiar the longer I work on it I am able to do things in that project I might not do on assignment. But the benefit is that once I’ve done it successfully in my personal project, I bring that into my assignments. So personal projects become the guinea pig for the rest of my work.
The end result is something I created from the heart, and those projects will always stand out in my other work because I put so much emotion into them.
To get to the end help is needed. Personal Projects don’t make themselves, and we can get lost in the shuffle of trying too many things or heading in too many directions at once. Help lets you know where you can place the work, and what might be missing from the work to get it there.
That is where I come in.
As a mentor my job is to guide you to see what your project can be. I will support you as you discover and re-discover your work. I will be there when you have that a-ha moment of realising where your project was actually headed the whole time. You just couldn’t see it right away. I will be there to act as your magnifying glass and your birds-eye view, depending on where you are.
Right now I’m offering mentoring in a group setting and alone. I believe this has two functions: Sharing your work with a group will make you focus on what matters in your work, and sharing your work in a private setting will let you experiment and feel safer to open up about your struggles in the work itself.
Registration for Project Unknown closes midnight July 7th!
There are only a few seats left in the mentored track, so don’t wait!
Here are two personal projects that have changed my work.
The Underdog
I met Sigrid through a story I did on the Iditarod sled dog race. I wanted to follow a Norwegian through the race and picked her because she was a young girl in a sea of older men. The three weeks I spent with her in Alaska in 2007 became a project lasting over 10 years, partly run by our friendship and partly run by our mutual fascination for each other’s lives. I can say that this project change the course of my entire life, unbeknownst to me at the time. It was the project that created the butterfly effect that led to my husband and eventually my next big personal project:
Learning To Speak Bear
I never intended to make our lives into a project. I wanted to keep my kids’ lives private and have them be separate from my work. But I also didn’t intend to have three children in the span of 15 months and become depressed and overwhelmed, so we can’t plan for everything, especially with little kids. My way out was to photograph them, share the photographs with other mothers and talk openly about the struggles I was facing as a mom in the 21st century. In a workshop I made this slideshow, and it was suggested it should be a book. Later in July I start fundraising for that book, and if successful I will be holding it in December.