Two weeks against pretty: the photographs I want to show

Two weeks ago I published a manifesto on this blog (read it here). Twelve rules. No chimping, no deleting, no taking the picture I knew would be good. The vow at the centre was that I would make photographs I didn’t want to show anyone, and publish them regardless. This is what actually happened. The manifesto was designed to make street photography hard for me again. For the first few days it did. I stopped myself constantly. I’d see something, start composing it in my head, and the moment would pass. I lost real photographs to old habits. Then it stopped hurting. By two-three days into the project, I had started to like the method, and by the end of the first week I liked the pictures. That is, on the manifesto’s own terms, a problem. The vow was that I would make photographs I didn’t want to show. Instead I made photographs I am now picking out to print. The thing the rules were meant to dismantle, my taste, quietly reasserted itself, just in a different register. The body did the…