(This blog post first appeared on May 28, 2011)

When thinking about what to photograph I’ve come to think in terms of projects. In fact, ”project thinking” helped me take my photography to a new level. Project thinking has been very important to me as I worked to build a body of work. I tend not to look for isolated interesting subjects to photograph. Sometimes a scene or potential photographic subject will catch my attention and I will do my best to make an interesting photograph. Occasionally, such photographs become the start of a project.

Projects often persist for years. Some I envision will last for the rest of my lifetime as a photographer. My“Pizza Man” project began in 2007. On our first trip to Italy we spent time in Rome, Florence, Sienna, and Fiesole. Eventually the pizza men outside of the restaurants caught my attention.  Often they would have a placard or menu intended to entice visitors into the establishment that they graced. I came to realize that nearly all of them were unique. I began to photograph every pizza man that I came across. By the time that first trip to Italy had ended I had about 6 or 8 unique pizza men. Later I came across some pizza men in New York City and then in Spain. When I was in China one of the people who I was traveling with told me that she had seen a pizza man. Unfortunately, I did not come across that one. Nevertheless, I now have a collection of 15 pizza men on a gallery on my website. While I tend to think of most of my projects as “projects”, for some reason I think of the pizza men in my pizza man project as a “collection”. You might understand why I see this collection as something that is more fun than serious.  It certainly has been fun and I’m sure that more additions to the collection will be forthcoming. Do you think in “projects”? If so, what has “project thinking” done for your photography?