The idea for “SETSOFTEN” was purely my wife’s doing. And what a brilliant idea it has turned out to be.
The last few months have been pretty rough on me, both personally, as well as from a business perspective. I moved to Austria towards the end of 2020, pretty much in the middle of the whole pandemic. Why did I choose that exact moment to move to a new country on a new continent….? There is an answer for that, but one that’m just not going to get into here and now. Anyway, the situation being what it was, was not exactly the most germane for getting a freelance photo business off the ground. There was very little work, things did not look positive at all, and on top of that, I had lost just about every gram of motivation I had left. Enter SETSOFTEN….
My wife, Claudia, suggested the idea of putting together a little project that would help me get motivated, force me to look through my archives, and start putting together sets of images for an eventual PUBLICATION. All I needed was some patience and a few ideas about which of my older images I would like to use, but perhaps had not had the chance to, up to this point.
So started a long and fairly drawn out process of digging through old hard drives, revisiting projects I had once started but never finished, and trying to finish up ongoing projects. The impetus was a good one; to get more images out there in the open. I managed to find a whole bunch of images, dating back to my first trip to South Korea, our bike trip through Asia, and from my time spent photographing the Canadian suburbs in Kingston.
I have always loved working with sets of images. There is something about having a body of work that seems to lend each individual frame more legitimacy. Putting together a group of photos that belong together, even if the technical execution is lacking, lends the images a form of credibility that is hard to come by with just a single image. It is with this thinking that I wanted to put together “10 sets of 10 images”, hence the name “SETSOF10”.
Unfortunately for me, the main channel through which I will be “publishing” these images will be Instagram, and as we all know, the look of our grid carries value beyond just the single images that make up the grid. The Instagram grid is 3 images wide, which is where multiples of 3 work well. Due to this, rather unfortunate, “formatting issue”, the sets of ten will actually be made up of 9 images a set, to more harmoniously align with the grid. Oh, to be dictated to by Instagram…
The sets of images that I will post here will either be the full set of 10 images, or in some cases might even be more than the standard 10, if I had more images for a project that I wish to share.
As you will see, as the months go on, and more of these “SETSOF10” get published, the images are not always the most incredible images when taken as standalones, but once they form part of a body of work, they start to gel together beautifully to make up the whole. Some of these sets have even been photographed on my cellphone, and were never taken with the intention of turning them into anything. They were simply me documenting my daily happenings.
Digging through so many of my old harddrives and folders has been an amazing experience. For one, I got to relieve a bunch of cool memories, often from quite far back. The other benefit is that I looked back into old project folders and found projects that had fizzled out for whatever reason, but I now have the impetus to continue working on these projects.
So, as you may have guessed, this will be an ongoing series of posts, both here on the blog as well as on Instagram and other channels. This series that I will kick this off with is my “phonebooth” series, which I started many years ago, with no particular objective in mind, other than simply photographing public phones when and as I saw them.
Here we go: SETSOF10, Set 1: Phonebooths
