Albert Camus, Nobel prize winner and son of Menorquin immigrants, developed in his many writings and plays, the idea of the Absurd: a concept defined as the disharmony between our pursuit of meaning in life in an essentially meaningless and indifferent universe.
The challenge assigned was to photograph for a set amount of time per day (to avoid getting into trouble with our family members for not spending time with them) and to do a series of “Street photography without people, but with traces of them.”
This assignment was set to get you all working on portraits, with the extra challenge of photographing someone who was opposite to you (in their way of thinking, character, background etc.)…We had some great entries overall but our winner went beyond the assignment with a very intimate, personal and introspective take on the challenge.
We all know that being a photographer is a relatively lonely passion/profession, and for good reason: Good photography, like wine, takes time and the doses of patience needed is not always shared by those with whom we spend our vacations with.
In documentary or street photography there are several types of photos that are essential to take to explain a story: Place (The where) Action (It is the plot, the reason for the story) Details (It brings you closer to the action and makes you better understand the particularities of the action) and the portrait.
In Phoenix, Arizona, police brutality protests over the deaths of George Floyd and many other black Americans broke out almost as soon as the COVID-19 stay at home order was lifted. Meanwhile, the unsheltered population of over 5,000 people faces another summer in one of America’s hottest cities. Many are experiencing homelessness for the first time after losing their jobs due to the pandemic. Things here are anything but “normal”.
Things are slowly starting to ‘normalise’ and in most countries people are able to go out to a greater or lesser extent, and I imagine that most of you have been out or are eager to go out and use your cameras! So, with that in mind, I thought I would propose an assignment for all of you to do in order to get back into the game and experience what it is like to be on assignment for a magazine (in this case it’ll be for our blog and Instagram instead 😉 ).