It’s come to a point where I have more mobile photography than I know what to do with.
That number is in the triple digits, and it’s just sitting on my phone. Some of it was with my phone, some were with my Fuji X100T, but all were edited on my iPhone using various apps. I’m happy with the photos; as happy as a photographer can be with their own work, but it does not fit with the two projects I’m working on. The projects I’m working on are welcome to include mobile photography, but only a small number of these photos fit the projects’ criteria.
I could make a book, either digital or hardcopy. This seems the most obvious choice for a photographer, for good reason. The problem I see with this is that mobile photography and work that isn’t taken within the confinements of a project’s theme is difficult to conclude. You’re always taking another shot, needing to redraw the cutoff line.
“Just one more shot.”
“This one is decent. I’ll put it with the others.”
“It’s just a mobile photography dump.”
“It’s not going to put food in my mouth, so what I do with it is no big deal.”
They are quotes you would hear if you were living in my head every day. It can be really frustrating. If I made a book, it would need to be digital to allow me to add new work to it regularly. I could make it available on the iBookstore and by PDF, with updates being issued as I add new work. It makes it easy to maintain, but could be redundant since it is a digital medium that doesn’t differ too much from work published on this blog. Maybe it needs some context to the photos that is only in the digital book. Or maybe that isn’t enough to warrant maintaining a dedicated medium for only one sub-genre of my work.
Another idea I’ve been playing with is the idea of limited edition print runs. You may remember some time ago I ran a living project I called Movement. The concept behind the project was to experiment with super limited edition print runs that only had one print made of a single image. The tag line was ‘One image, one print’ or something like that. The feedback I received on the concept was positive, with the price point for the rarity of an image being the most common reason for supporting my work.
If I ran another project similar to Movement it would be a limited run of two A4 prints per image. One for me and one for the buyer. This way, the rarity is maintained but the mobile photography would have a purpose again. It wouldn’t need to have a common link and there would be new content being created regularly, which takes away my hesitation for selling work in such a super limited quantity. It continues to be a photographer shooting some stuff that allows people to feel the product. Or maybe photography I edit on my mobile doesn’t warrant that.
Help me out. Help me help you. Help me help myself. What should I do with them?
