Jessica Hays1 started The Sun Sets Midafternoon without knowing how long the project would last. She was photographing wildfires across the American West, making photographs, videos and keeping a journal along the way.

Towards the end of that first fire season, she brought some of that material together.

She made a book.

Hays selected photographs and writing from the previous months and turned them into a handmade book. You might expect something like this to come near the end of a project, but for Hays, it came after the first fire season.

And it told her something she had not known when she started.

“That book taught me a lot, mainly that this project was something important, and also that I wasn’t done yet, and it would be many more fires before I was.”

So she continued. Over the following years, Hays photographed more fire seasons and made two more handmade versions of the book as the work developed. Each version followed one or more additional seasons, with more photographs available each time.

I find that first book interesting because it did something we might not normally expect a book to do. It did not close the project, but it helped Hays understand how much further it still had to go.

Which made me wonder what would happen if we applied the same idea much earlier, before there even was a book to make.

Imagine the photographs you have right now. Maybe they already belong to a project. Maybe there are a few dozen photographs that seem connected, but you are not quite sure why. Or they are simply photographs you keep returning to while continuing to make more.

The natural thing is to keep photographing. Another month, another trip, another hundred photographs. There is always the possibility that the next photograph will make things clearer.

But what if, just temporarily, there wasn’t a next photograph?

What if the photographs you have now were all you were going to get?

You would have to ask something different of them. Instead of wondering what else you could photograph, you would have to look at what is already there and decide whether it is enough.

Anette Nordskog2 found herself in something close to this situation while working along the Lågen river in Norway.

She had lived in the area for around fifteen years when, in 2023, she accidentally noticed some fishing equipment below a bridge. It led her to one of the small wooden rafts used for a centuries-old local salmon-fishing tradition. She went home, looked it up, and became, in her words, “absolutely obsessed” with what she had found.

Her first idea was straightforward: photograph the rafts as a typology.

Within two weeks, she found 24 of them and photographed them.

In one sense, she had done what she set out to do. There were the rafts and there were the photographs… and then she looked at them.

“While looking at the pictures later on, I realised that something was missing, and that I wanted to make a more complete story about it.”

So the project expanded. Nordskog began looking beyond the rafts themselves. She photographed the fishermen, the long periods of waiting, the huts and their interiors, people spending their nights beside the river, and the quieter relationship between the rafts and the surrounding landscape.

She could have kept photographing more rafts, but that would not have solved the problem she had noticed. What was missing was the life around them.

Looking at those first 24 photographs had given her useful information. The project needed to continue, but now she had a better idea of where to look next.

And I think this is where temporarily finishing something can become useful.

As long as a body of photographs remains open, almost any uncertainty can be answered in the same way: keep photographing. Another photograph might solve it. Another month might make the direction clearer.

But temporarily removing that option changes the question.

Instead of asking, What else could I photograph?, you have to ask what the photographs already there can actually do on their own.

Maybe they are enough. Maybe there simply aren’t enough of them yet. Or, as Nordskog discovered, they may show you that the project needs something you were not even looking for when you started.

Trying to finish does not necessarily tell you that you are finished. Sometimes it gives you a more specific reason to continue.

But this is also where the idea becomes more complicated.

If looking at an unfinished body of work can tell you what is missing, what should you do with that information when you pick up the camera again?

Read more

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Martin

You may think you photograph the street. Or your family. Or the landscape around where you live. But look back through enough photographs and you may notice that something more specific keeps returning.

Wei Jian Chan1 found this in an archive of around 40,000 photographs.

When he began thinking about turning his street photography into a book, he tried organising the photographs in ways that seemed obvious.

First by geography. Then chronology. Then subject.

None of them felt right.

So Chan selected a few hundred photographs, made small work prints and began moving them around his flat. He kept doing this for months.

And gradually, he noticed something he had never deliberately looked for.

Many of the photographs contained people whose identities were obscured. Faces were hidden or turned away. Chan had never set himself a rule to photograph people anonymously.

But he kept doing it.

There were other patterns too. Geometry appeared repeatedly in the photographs, although Chan says he had been responding to it instinctively rather than treating it as part of a larger idea. Only now, with the photographs in front of him, could he begin to see these choices together.

Chan had moved from Singapore to the UK. Looking back, he began connecting the anonymity and distance in the photographs with his own experience of displacement and estrangement.

The photographs were the same, but Chan now saw something he had missed before.

He knew he was making street photographs, but he did not know what kept catching his attention on the street.

This can be difficult to notice while we are photographing. One photograph of a person with their face obscured may tell us very little about what keeps attracting our attention. Neither may five or ten.

Sometimes the pattern only becomes visible once we have enough photographs to compare.

Peter Funch2 spent nine years photographing the morning rush hour from the same two locations near Grand Central Terminal in New York. He would return between 8:30 and 9:30 in the morning, often photographing the same commuters as they walked to work.

At first, Funch thought of what he was doing as creating what he called “libraries of strangers.” But over those nine years, the same people appeared again and again and so did their habits. Someone carried coffee in the same way. Another person smoked a cigarette. Certain gestures, expressions and routines repeated themselves, sometimes months or years apart.

Funch had been photographing these repetitions for years before he understood what they could become. That happened late in the process, in 2015. He began putting photographs of the same person beside one another. A photograph made on one morning could now be compared with another made months or years later.

And the relationship between them changed what Funch could see.

“The real story existed in the space between two images,” he later told me. Repetition and routine had become central to how Funch understood the work. Once he saw that, the edit moved quickly.

Chan had discovered something recurring in the kinds of photographs he was drawn to. Funch found something slightly different. It only became visible through the relationship between photographs made at different times.

One photograph could show a commuter holding a cup of coffee. Only several photographs made over time could show that he kept doing it.

Some things only become visible when we look at photographs together.

But there is a problem with taking this too far. Look through enough photographs and we can probably find all kinds of repetition: the same colour, the same gesture, the same kind of person, a recurring distance or shape.

The fact that something repeats does not necessarily mean it explains what the photographs are about.

So how do we know when a pattern deserves to change how we understand the work?

Read more

Look at this photograph.

Five young Palestinian men are preparing to throw stones at an Israeli army position.

Ethan Eisenberg1 made it in a town in the West Bank, just outside Jerusalem. He had managed to get close to the men and photograph them from the front.

The photograph seemed to fit naturally into the work he was making. He had been photographing Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza for years. This was part of what he had encountered there and he considered it a strong photograph.

The work would eventually become Jerusalem Delivered.

But this photograph didn’t make the book.

As Eisenberg worked on the edit, he began looking at the photograph alongside several others showing riots and arrests. On their own, they recorded different moments. Together, Eisenberg became concerned that they were pushing the book too far in one direction, leaving Palestinians represented primarily through violence. So, late in the editing process, he decided to take it out.

There is one thing about this decision that I keep coming back to.

Eisenberg had not changed his mind about whether the photograph was strong. The problem appeared when he stopped looking at it on its own.

There is a fairly simple explanation for what happened here. Eisenberg already had several photographs of conflict. Adding another one risked repeating something the book was already saying.

But another decision he made while editing Jerusalem Delivered makes this more complicated.

Eisenberg worked on the book with photographer Mark Steinmetz. During one of their sessions, they looked mainly at individual photographs. In another, they concentrated on how the photographs worked together in sequence.

Steinmetz kept returning to two photographs Eisenberg had not valued as highly.

One showed a young Hasidic girl running across an empty lot with an empty baby carriage and the other showed a Christian Orthodox woman kissing the Weeping Stone.

Eisenberg had wondered whether the photographs were too simple.

But when he began seeing them as part of the sequence, that simplicity started to matter differently. He felt the photographs had a gentle quality that helped balance some of the more aggressive images elsewhere in the book.

So something almost opposite had happened.

A photograph Eisenberg considered strong became less useful when he saw it beside the others. Photographs he had initially considered too simple became more useful for exactly the same reason.

This is where his edit becomes more interesting to me.

If editing a project were simply a matter of finding the strongest photographs and removing the weaker ones, neither decision would make much sense.

But Eisenberg was no longer judging only what each photograph could do on its own. He was beginning to judge what each photograph allowed the others to do.

But repetition was not the only reason a strong photograph could become difficult to keep.

Jo Ann Chaus2 ran into a different problem while editing Unspoken. The book grew out of roughly ten years of self-portraits, and she spent more than two years working on the edit.

During that process, an arc began to emerge. Chaus describes it as a movement from being stuck to becoming unstuck, from constraint towards empowerment.

Some photographs simply did not fit that movement.

One of them was Ode to Degas. Chaus considered it a great image, but also theatrical and closer to another genre of her work. Another, Pink Roses, did not speak to the arc that was taking shape in the book.

What makes these decisions interesting is that Chaus was not trying to get rid of photographs she thought had failed.

Actually quite the opposite.

Some of the photographs she removed were, in her words, “great as stand-alone pictures.”

They still had to go.

By this point, the question was no longer only whether a photograph was good enough to be included. Chaus had started asking what she wanted the book to say, and whether each photograph supported that.

A photograph could therefore succeed perfectly well on its own and still belong to a different version of the work.

To me this seems to be a harder decision than simply choosing between a good photograph and a bad one. Because once photographs have to work together, being good is no longer the only thing we are asking of them.

What changes is the job we are asking them to do.

And this is where I start to wonder what we actually mean by a “best photograph.”

We usually use the word best as though photographs can be placed on a single scale. One is stronger than another, so naturally we keep the stronger one.

But a project introduces another kind of value.

A photograph can be strong on its own and still become the wrong photograph once it has to become part of something larger.

Sandra Cattaneo Adorno3 has already appeared in this publication for almost the opposite reason. In an earlier issue, I looked at how one successful photograph she made in Santa Monica led her towards something worth pursuing.

But when I was writing that article, I also noticed something else.

For Fragments of Light, Cattaneo Adorno was not choosing photographs for just one form. The exhibition included prints, a photomosaic, large curtain panels and a projection in which 55 photographs gradually transformed into one another.

Each form required her to look at the photographs differently.

For the mosaic, she needed a composition that would still work when divided into separate panels. The projection required something else. There, she paid attention to visual flow and to how lines and shapes in one photograph interacted with those in the next.

What I find really interesting is that, for the projection, Cattaneo Adorno was thinking more about how the photographs interacted with each other than how they worked as individual frames.

With Eisenberg and Chaus, the question was whether a strong photograph still belonged once it became part of a book. With Cattaneo Adorno, even the way the photographs are shown can change what she needs from them.

A photograph selected for an individual print is not necessarily the photograph she would select for a mosaic or a projection. Each form asks something different of it.

That does not make one photograph better than another.

It means that before we can decide which photograph is best, we may first need to know what we are asking it to do.

Read more

In December 2012, Pete Souza1 ()travelled with Barack Obama to Newtown, Connecticut, after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. As Obama’s Chief Official White House Photographer, Souza was there to document the visit. But photographing grieving families was different from photographing a meeting in the Oval Office. The families knew that a White House photographer would be there and Souza tried to remain unobtrusive. When someone seemed uncomfortable with his presence, he backed away.

He still made photographs. Now, what happened to those photographs afterward was another matter.

There was one detail that stood out to me, when I went back to our interview with Pete Souza for this article. The photographs from private meetings with grieving families were not made public unless the families gave permission. These families received photographs from the meetings, but without that permission, the images remained private.

One of those photographs came from Newtown and for years, that was where it stayed.

Then, about five years later, Souza was working on his book Obama: An Intimate Portrait. The book was intended to show Obama not only as president but, well, as a human being. Souza thought the Newtown photograph belonged in that story.

He already had the photograph. But instead of simply putting it in the book, he actually went back to the family and showed them a mock-up. He explained where the photograph would appear and why he wanted to include it. And he made something else clear: if they did not want the photograph in the book, he would remove it.

The family agreed.

What interests me about this story is not whether Souza made the right decision. It is that he felt there was another decision to make at all. Nothing about the photograph itself had changed during those five years, but what Souza was asking it to do had.

A photograph that had remained private was about to become part of a publicly available book, seen by an entirely different audience. The original photographic encounter could not tell Souza whether he should publish it now.

Permission to make a photograph does not necessarily settle every later decision about what happens to it.

This isn’t just true for situations as difficult as Newtown. Photos often last longer than the events they capture. Years later, they might appear in a book, an exhibition, or be used for something nobody considered when they were taken.

Souza’s solution seems straightforward and, when the circumstances change enough, perhaps the photographer should simply ask again.

But that creates another problem.

If someone agreed to be photographed, how much say should they have over what happens next?

Should they be able to approve the photograph that is selected? Its publication? The way it appears in a project? And if photography is collaborative, does that also make the person being photographed a collaborator in the final edit?

This is where consent stops giving us an easy answer.

Read more

When something does not work, it is easy to move on. But when a photograph does work, there is a reason to return to it. The same subject, the same place, the same kind of light. Perhaps simply another photograph that feels like the first.

The thing is that success does not directly tell us what was worth returning to.

Sandra Cattaneo Adorno1 encountered this through a photograph she made in Santa Monica. She was photographing around the pier when reflections began to break the scene into overlapping pieces of reality. Looking at the photograph later, she realized there was something in the reflection that went beyond the visual effect. It made the ordinary world in front of her feel less certain.

“Since I took this image, I started looking out for them,” she later said.

Photography had begun as a hobby for Cattaneo Adorno. She had only started seriously taking pictures in her sixties, after attending a workshop with Alex2 and Rebecca Webb3.

The Santa Monica photograph gave that attention a direction. She began noticing reflections elsewhere and what had appeared unexpectedly in one photograph became something she could return to, question and develop. Over time, that way of looking became part of a much larger body of work.

This suggests one possible answer to what comes after a good photograph:

To understand what made the photograph worth returning to.

Not simply how the photograph looks, but what made it interesting enough to return to. Sometimes a photograph reveals a subject, sometimes a relationship. A particular limitation, a question, or simply a way of looking that had not been obvious before.

But there is a problem with that answer. It is not always clear what exactly has been found.

Danielle L. Goldstein4 had been photographing for only about a year when she made a self-portrait in a hotel room in Seville. She placed her camera on an available ledge and made a ghost-like image of herself in the temporary room. There was no larger project behind it.

“I sensed that the concept was interesting, but in its very nascent form I wasn’t quite sure why.”

She made another one anyway.

Goldstein began photographing herself in hotel rooms whenever she travelled. The basic condition remained remarkably simple: a temporary room and her own presence inside it. She continued for fourteen years.

Only gradually did the photographs begin to tell her what the work was about. What started with the anonymity of hotel rooms became more personal. Her marriage ended. Her circumstances changed. Other people entered the photographs. Rules she had established for herself loosened.

When she eventually looked back at the work as a whole, the pictures had become something she could not have fully described when she made that first photograph in Seville.

“Clarity often comes after the fact,” she said.

When I think about it, this means that the answer does not have to come first.

If it is not clear what made the first photograph interesting, making another can be a way of finding out. Not by trying to recreate the first photograph exactly, but by repeating part of what produced it and seeing what happens when the rest changes.

Goldstein returned to the same basic idea: herself, a temporary room and a camera. But each time, the room was different. Then her own life began to change too. Photo after photo, what had begun as an experiment in Seville became something she could understand more clearly.

The next photograph does not have to prove that the first one was good. It can help explain why it mattered. But understanding that something matters still does not tell you how to turn it into something larger.

So how do a few interesting photographs become something you can keep building on?

Read more

The photographs didn’t work.

Misrach later described them to me as “predictable and not very interesting.”

He calls his approach “Being Aggressively Receptive,” and I keep thinking about that phrase. The longer we photograph, the more things we learn to recognise. A certain kind of light. A gesture. A relationship between two people. A particular distance or composition. Eventually, some of our decisions become almost automatic.

So, why do some photographers see pictures you would walk straight past?

From his home overlooking San Francisco Bay, Misrach could see enormous cargo ships passing in the distance. They were there all the time. And after a while, that was exactly what made them difficult to see.

During the pandemic, supply-chain disruptions brought his attention back to the ships. He began making the photographs that became Cargo, all made from essentially the same place. Day after day, the position remained almost unchanged. The ships didn’t. Neither did the light, the weather or the atmosphere around them.

Before, Misrach had stopped paying attention to the ships because they were always there. Yet his response was not to go somewhere new. It was to return to the same view again and again.

The longer we photograph, the better we become at recognising what works for us. We learn what catches our attention and what kind of photograph feels worth taking. That experience helps us make decisions.

But what if it also makes some photographs harder to see?

Read more

I remember liking the way his body stretched across the empty sky. His arms, the bent knees, the small figures behind him. It was one of those moments that came together quickly.

But I already knew another photograph.

Elliott Erwitt1 had photographed a man jumping in front of the Eiffel Tower almost thirty years earlier

I can’t tell you whether I was thinking about Erwitt when I pressed the shutter. I probably wasn’t. But I knew his photograph well. Put the two pictures next to each other and the resemblance is hard to miss.

Once I noticed it, I started wondering what had actually happened. Had I borrowed something without even noticing? And if I had, was that necessarily a problem?

The more I thought about it, the less useful the usual advice seemed: be inspired, but don’t copy.

What does that actually mean?

It made me think of a conversation I had with Rebecca Norris Webb2.

Her father had been a country doctor in Indiana and years later, while studying photography in New York, she came across W. Eugene Smith’s Country Doctor, a photo essay following a rural doctor in Colorado3.

Norris Webb began wondering what that story might look like if it were photographed by a woman who was also a country doctor’s daughter.

That question eventually became Night Calls.

What interests me is what she borrowed from Smith. It wasn’t the photographs. Country Doctor gave Norris Webb something she could make her own.

She spent the next six years retracing the routes of her father’s house calls through Rush County, Indiana. She photographed former patients and their descendants, but gradually found herself working more and more at night and in the early morning. Those were the hours when her father had often been called away for births, deaths, accidents, and emergencies.

Norris Webb had studied poetry before photography, and writing also found its way into the project. She began creating what she describes as a series of letters to her father. Photography became mixed with memory, landscape, family history, and grief.

None of that came from Smith.

Smith was still there somewhere at the beginning of all this. But the further Norris Webb followed the question, the less useful his answer became.

She had borrowed the starting point, not the destination.

What I like about this is that it suggests we don’t necessarily have to turn away from the photographs that stay with us. Maybe we need to look at them more closely and ask what exactly stayed.

For a moment, I thought this gave me a neat answer to my own photograph.

Borrow the question, not the photograph.

Except that doesn’t quite work either.

Liam Wong4 did almost the opposite with TO:KY:OO.

I mean, he literally told me:

“I would spend nights trying different approaches and mimicking images I would find online, or from my favourite photographers. Composition, texture and depth from Saul Leiter, the verticality of Fan Ho or the rhythm of Christopher Doyle.”

Wong was actively trying to reproduce parts of the photographs he admired. And it was helping him learn.

What I find interesting is how specific he was about it. He wasn’t trying to become the next Saul Leiter5. He was looking at smaller things inside the photographs: depth, texture, composition. From Fan Ho6, it was verticality. From Christopher Doyle, rhythm.

Wong described it to me as breaking the work that influences you into individual components and trying to recreate them.

Recreating those individual elements was a way for Wong to understand them.

That part could then be combined with everything else he was bringing to his own work.

His background in game design mattered here too. So did cinema, graphic design, animation, and the cities he photographed. Over time, those influences became mixed together rather than pointing back to a single source.

Wong made me reconsider the conclusion I had reached with Norris Webb. The important difference seemed to be what happened to whatever they borrowed.

Hannah Altman’s We Will Return to You7 pushed that idea somewhere else.

Her starting point wasn’t another photographer. It was Jewish folklore, Yiddish literature, family stories, and traditions passed down through generations.

Altman was interested in the things that kept returning across those stories. Certain symbols, gestures, objects, and ways of telling them. Rather than illustrating the stories themselves, she began pulling out those smaller elements and finding new ways for them to exist in photographs.

She could take something from an old story without retelling the story itself.

In a way, Altman was doing something surprisingly close to Wong. He broke photographs into smaller parts. She did it with stories.

Borrowing wasn’t the problem. Stopping at someone else’s solution was.

Alex Kilbee once told me something during a photo critique8. We were looking at one of my photographs that had been inspired by another image, and he explained why he thought it didn’t work:

“The reason why I don’t think that it works is because it’s not your idea.”

At first, that sounds like the same old warning about copying.

But Kilbee went further. He described once recreating the pose and lighting from a photographer he admired. He could do it technically but the photograph just never felt right to him.

His explanation was simple: he had borrowed someone else’s idea in someone else’s voice.

Read more

But there is a strange gap.

We can become much better at understanding other people’s photography without becoming much better at understanding our own.

Which idea is worth continuing? Do these photographs actually belong together? When should you stop shooting? What can you learn from a photographer you admire without copying them?

Photography, Reconsidered grew out of these questions.

For more than a decade, I have interviewed photographers for About Photography. Over time, I began noticing that the most useful parts of those conversations were often not about what photographers made, but about the decisions behind it.

Why they abandoned an idea. Why they kept working when a project still made little sense…

Every photographer works differently. Every project is unique.

Yet the same creative problems appear again and again.

That is what Photography, Reconsidered looks for.

Each Issue takes one photographic problem and examines how photographers have dealt with it. The goal is not to turn their experience into rules or teach you to photograph like someone else. It is to understand the thinking behind their decisions and ask what might remain useful for your own work.

There are already enough things asking photographers to do more. Make more photographs. Start another project. Learn another technique. Keep up with more.

Photography, Reconsidered is interested in something quieter.

What is worth continuing? What is worth removing? What is worth reconsidering?

The aim is simple: not to give you more photography to consume, but to help you make better decisions about your own.

Take an idea. Use it if it helps.

Your photography remains yours.

If you want to spend less time simply consuming photography and more time understanding what you can do with your own, subscribe below.

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