A Photo Project is Never Finished...

Sorry for that cheesy title, obviously inspired by the famous quote from Paul Valery about poems never being finished, but only abandoned. Yet, somehow it feels right for what I’m going to write about.

For the last 16 years, I’ve been working on photographs documenting the place I live at; my family, neighbours, the local community. It’s never been a specific photo project with a set deadline, and I’ve had periods of intense work as well as of total abandonment. Over a year ago I decided that I finally can and should do something with all of these mini projects, one-off photographs, family photos, landscape photography and so on.

I started culling the photos into groups and sub-groups, and sub-sub-groups — You know where I’m getting at. I was thinking of the narrative for the photos, the leitmotif, but whatever I came up with, there was somehow not enough photos. In effect, I worked really hard and the last 12 months have been the most productive photographically in my entire life. I am a frugal photographer, so productive means I made about 10-15 images last year that I am somewhat happy with. Combined with my output from the previous years. I gathered about 300 images that could potentially be used to build a final selection. I also came up with further ideas where to take my photography in the future, but I came to a conclusion that there must be a hard stop at some point — that it is right now, and I have to start working on the edit, regardless of what is to come. Otherwise I would only continue hoarding images that I had no idea what to do with, and never come up with anything worth showing.

Working with photos from such a long period brought about additional issues, namely consistency and coherence of vision. I changed as a photographer in this time. I photograph differently now than I did a decade ago, and it shows in the photographs. Some material I wanted to include was shot in BW on film, so at one point I wanted to do the entire project in monochrome, because that would let me add these analog photos and unify the look of the entire thing. Ultimately, I decided against it, and got rid of all analog photos from the selection.

Editing such a collection down proved very difficult, if not impossible. I had to ask myself and answer many questions. The problem with documentary photography is that no matter how objective we aim to be as authors, there is no escaping from our personal vision, shaped by our beliefs, worldview, understanding or misunderstanding of what we look at. Not to mention the strictly photographic decisions about what to include in the frame, what not to include, or the moment we release the shutter.

I had to take all of this into consideration and make many tough decisions. I won’t even count the number of “this must be in the final edit” photos that went back to the rejected pile. Getting rid of the bangers for the sake of narrative was painful. I fell into a trap of wanting to show everything in an all-encompasing edit, and coming up with selections of images that were way too wordy, and in effect boring.

Finally, I wound up with about 60 images that would go for the final edit. I laid out small prints on the coffee table and — after rejecting the idea that maybe I should start over because all these photos are worthless — I worked out the final selection.

Having seen all of the artist feature posts on ’s Substack, I felt a bout of inspiration and decided to go a bit more loose with my edit. I wanted to eschew the obvious narratives and chronology, and I tried to work out a sequence of images that talked to one another, either formally, or due to some associations between them. That’s when it all finally came together.

So, what’s it all about? In short, it is about my local community, but I want to believe that it is also somewhat universal. It’s about the deeply ingrained faith, but also about superstition. It’s about the everyday, and the holiday, about the beautiful and the ugly. I don’t want to get too pompous, haha. I think this collection of photos sums up well this long period of time it took to make. Not all photos are super great, but you can’t have everything, can you? I could make at least a dozen edits that would be better in some respect, or make completely separate usable edits just from the rejected photos. I think this final edit is the most complete and I feel like a huge weight has been released from my back. I can finally do something else, get a fresh start. You can check my final edit out in the gallery below.

And hey, Thanks!

Jakub