Project Stranger
Preface — This journal entry was written during the recent Nor’easter that battered much of the Eastern Seaboard. We were lucky here in Rhode Island, and my sympathies go out to those who fared worse to the south. Stuck indoors and still getting over a damn cold, I turned to some overdue introspection. The result is the long entry below — my apologies in advance. I have delayed posting it as it took some courage, or probably something more like overcoming fear and insecurity to put someting like this out into the world; a piece of self-examination and reflection. It is still a little bit frightening.
Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about what kind of photographer I am. Looking at my portfolio, my work is all over the place — I drift from one subject or style to another, often chasing whatever catches my fancy or following photographers I admire. I’ve never been good at pinning down a personal style or vision, and that inconsistency has always bothered me.
In recent years, though, I’ve tried to tell stories through my work — with mixed results. The genesis for that was a workshop at the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts: Project Development, Storytelling, Photo Essays, and the Personal Project with David H. Wells. The projects I developed there helped me realize that what I make isn’t purely documentary, nor entirely personal or conceptual. My work lives somewhere in between, and that “in-between” space is where my current project, A Stranger in a Strange Land, has taken root. It’s not a documentary or a narrative essay — it’s something else, and I’m still working out what that means.
You may have noticed — or, let’s be honest, probably not — that I’ve updated the images on my website’s landing page. The new ones are from A Stranger in a Strange Land, a project that likely began during the COVID pandemic, when some of the first photographs were made. I’ve been revisiting it lately with the goal of completing a book or zine — one of my small maquette projects that helps test whether a body of work has the depth to pursue further. Not every project survives that process; some simply don’t have enough substance to keep going.
This one, though, refuses to die. It’s been abandoned, revised, and resurrected more times than I can count. Earlier versions were entirely black and white, but after discovering several photobooks that inspired me, I shifted to color. I highly recommend these:
- Sleeping by the Mississippi — Alec Soth (Steidl, 2004)
- Intimate Distance — Todd Hido (Aperture, 2016)
- ZZYZX — Gregory Halpern (MACK, 2016)
- King, Queen, Knave — Gregory Halpern (MACK, 2024)
- Meadowlark — Ian Bates (Deadbeat Club, 2022)
If you click the titles, you’ll find them on photoeye.com — a wonderful bookstore and gallery in Santa Fe, NM. Each listing includes a “Book Tease,” showing a few sample pages if you’re curious about the artists. I apologize for the fact that you will have to navigate back from those links to this post - one of the drawbacks of Squarespace.
These photographers all work within what’s often called the post-documentary tradition, defined by the Photo Work Foundation as:
A discipline of photography that emerges from the photographer’s personal engagement with the real world, emphasizing a subjective, lyrical approach to picture-making and storytelling…
While many artists resist labels, I think their work fits comfortably within that framework. They all work primarily in color, as do most artists associated with the genre today.
For a while, I was struggling to find my direction until I heard Sasha Wolf discuss the post-documentary tradition on her Photo Work podcast. Through her conversations with several of these artists — and further reading — I began to reimagine A Stranger in a Strange Land in that light. That shift revived my interest. I moved the project to color and began experimenting with giving my digital files a more “filmish” feel.
Right now, I’m using an RNI Films preset in Adobe Camera Raw called Agfacolor 60s, which lends a soft, yellowed tone — slightly overexposed and desaturated, with muted greens and reds. It’s not truly filmic, but it gets close enough to the mood I’m after.
In researching this approach — yes, using ChatGPT instead of those advertising-choked search engines — I came across an early description of the post-documentary impulse in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s essay The New Documentary Tradition in Photography (2004):
“In the late 1950s and early ’60s, American photographers reinvented the documentary tradition once again… The subjective tradition that had emerged in the 1940s and early ’50s became a kaleidoscope through which photographers looked at the world.”
I’m beginning to think A Stranger in a Strange Land may fall somewhere under that broad umbrella.
As I continue shaping the project, I’m less interested in categories and more curious about what the work reveals — about place, perception, and my own relationship to both as a stranger in as strange land. If the post-documentary tradition offers a home for that exploration, it’s one I’m happy to inhabit for now.
If you’ve made it this far, I have a favor to ask. Below are three digital zines/maquettes of A Stranger in a Strange Land, each with a slightly different design and sequence. They’re similar, but I’d be grateful if you could look through them and share any thoughts or recommendations. Thank you for reading — and for staying with me through this long reflection.