Three - My 2003 photo project is now online!

Three was part of the Brighton Festival Fringe 1 - 23 May 2004.

"A unique picture diary" - The Argus

One great thing about Blogger is that you can make retrospective posts, so I've decided to upload all the photos from my Three exhibition onto this site. If you look in my Archives section (left) you'll see that I've already posted all my photos from January - June 2003, and the remaining six months should appear over the next few days.

So, what was Three all about?

It all started back in December 2002 when I was sat at work having a conversation about modern art with Jim. We argued that pretty much anything could be considered art nowadays, so long as you're able to bullshit enough about it. This got me thinking. I'd long hardboured ideas of doing a photography based project but didn't know quite where to begin. I'd seen the movie Smoke years earlier in which Harvey Keitel's character takes the same picture outside his shop at the same time every morning. This quirky idea had lodged in my brain ever since. With a new year fast approaching this seemed the ideal opportunity to start such a project, as I liked the idea of working on something for an entire year. It was time to define some rules:

1. All photographs should be 6 x 4 horizontal shots.
2. All photographs should include me somewhere in them.
3. All photographs should be taken at 3pm.

There was just no way that I was going to be in the same place at the same time every day, so I needed to think of something different. I liked the idea of having these photographs at the same time every day, but soon decided if it was only me snapping away in my own little world then it wouldn't really add up to anything at all. I needed another constant - me. By putting myself into each photograph I would be documenting a whole year in my life, and by allowing the people around me to take these pictures there would be scope for many different interpretations - or so I hoped. The time of 3pm was chosen as this was a fairly sensible time of day to work with - too early and I might be asleep, too late and I knew I'd encounter too many problems. Plus, in the middle of the afternoon I'd more often than not be stuck at work. What better way to capture the year in the life of my workplace at the same time? So with the blessing of my boss I was ready to go.

The equipment I used was a Fuji Fotonex 200 APS camera which I'd owned for many years. I wanted to prove that you could do something like this very cheaply, so there was absolutely no point in splashing out on a brand new camera, especially with there being no guarantees that I'd even complete the project. Developing was also done as cheaply as possible, using mail order companies - until Truprint ruined that idea - and later, local high street retailers. The picture quality was never of paramount importance, for this project the idea itself was king.

These new Archives include all photographs taken during 2003 and I've added notes to each picture with my comments and memories of that particular shot. I hope you like them!