More photos than you’ve had hot dinners

Where do people get this idea that their photos are in any way interesting or important? Who decided that blurry pictures of drunken bridesmaids, dripping babies in long white frocks, fat cousins on beaches or off-kilter European churches should be shown to all and sundry? It’s a conspiracy, and it’s time it was stopped.

Your life is worthy of photographic documentation. Don’t be bullied by your vacationing, event-loving acquaintances: Just because you’re stuck at home with no plans to get married or born again, doesn’t mean you’re not special. You’re life is, in fact, endlessly fascinating. All you need are the photos to prove it.

What’s your favourite thing? Shoes? Dinner? Reading? Watching DVDs and TV? Your dog? Every day, for one month, photograph it. Photograph the shoes you wear each day. Photograph, every day, your dinner, or the last page you read before bed, or the screen of whatever you’re watching or your dog when he gets up in the morning. At the end of the month you’ll have 30 pictures of shoes (or dinner, or books, or…) that your workmates will be just dying to see. (If you’re really the vindictive type, host an old-fashioned slide show.)

And don’t forget: commentary is the most important part of any viewing. ‘Oh yes, I remember this dinner! Oh, it was fabulous! See that cheese sauce? Well, there was a part over near the left-hand corner of the dish that got quite coagulated during cooking, and I was worried for a while it wouldn’t come off in the dishwasher. So I said to Derek, ‘perhaps you should put your plate in the sink to soak for a while’ and he said…’

Stop motion

So you reckon nothing ever happens here? Let’s see if science agrees with you.

Grab a camera; if you have a tripod for it, so much the better. Stand somewhere you visit frequently (outside your front door might be the ideal spot) at a time of day you usually have a couple of minutes spare. Note your position carefully, open the lens up wide, and fire that shutter. Well done.

Here’s where it gets hard. Next day, at the same time, come back to the exact same spot and take the exact same photo. Repeat, daily, until you can bear to repeat no more (if you think doing this every day will drive you to the brink of madness, how about coming back once a week instead). Twenty photos should give you a nice cross-section, but if you really want a statistical sample, perhaps you should spread your recording over all four seasons.

Once you’re done, print your photos. Have a look. What’s different from photo to photo? Anything? For added impact, you could staple your photos in date order into a little book; flipping the pages will give you a better idea when something moves or changes. Why stop there? This is exactly the kind of conceptual art that trendy cafes lap up: why not print the lot in reasonably large format and ask your local latte spot (or public library) if they’ll exhibit your work?

Snap happy

Think of somewhere in your town that tourists love to visit (if you live in really tiny town you might have to go on a daytrip to do this excursion). Go there, and take your camera with you. Your mission: to photograph the tourists.

How you do this depends on the kind of person you are. You could take surreptitious candid art shots of tourists taking their own photographs (how post-modern). Or you could politely ask them to pose for your camera in front of the attraction, and ask them who they are, where they’re from and what they came to see, then write a little bio to go with each photo.

If you prefer to be part of the finished product and you live near a really popular attraction, try standing near people as they're lining up a shot, then walk in front of the camera as they press the shutter. Do this twenty or thirty times, and you could end up in photo albums in Madrid, Sydney, Osaka and Toronto.

Outdoor Alphabet

Whether you’re gluing together a ransom note or working on the Great American Novel, you won’t get far without the alphabet. You may not know this, but close to 100% of words are made up of letters of the alphabet. And yet how often do you stop and think, golly, aren’t letters nice? How often do you even really look at letters you see on the street?

Today (and probably for the next few days) you’re going to. Look at letters, that is. That’s because you’ll be collecting your very own alphabet, one you can treasure for years to come. As a side effect, you might also come to appreciate some of your town’s fine signage.

Traditionally, the alphabet starts with A, so that’s where we’ll begin. Head out onto the street and find yourself a letter A. Found one? Right: don’t steal it (I know it’s tempting, now you’ve seen how lovely it is). Take a photograph. Then look for a letter B. After that (you guessed it!), you want a letter C. If you’re only up to D and you see a particularly choice letter L, then go right ahead and photograph it, we won’t tell anyone.

Now you’ve got your alphabet, what are you going to do with it? You could use your imagination, or you could do as you're told. If you’ve taken Polaroids, you’ve just made yourself an art installation: spend the next few months convincing someone to show it. If you’ve used digital, then you’ve made yourself an alphabet you can use on your web page, on your mum's next birthday card or as the basis of that ransom note we mentioned earlier.