Themes

Over the last few months, I’ve been revisiting the concept of themes in my work as a way to examine some of my recent work, as well as, a way to view my work in a new light, with a new eye.  Spending some time looking at your work can provide insight and clues to where some of your creative energy is focused and where it might lead you going forward.  Themes of work can also be collections of work centered around a common theme.  Hunting for and finding images to pull together in to a thematic display can be a great exercise, again, to look at your body of work and be proud, see how far you’ve come, see where subconsciously you might have focused your attention, etc.   It can be a great exercise moving away from dates/locations/subjects and instead think about themes and how your work could fit in to various themes.

Why Themes?

I mentioned a bit above why you might think about looking through your catalog with an eye focused on themes.  I often find it entertaining, but more importantly, educational about my own work that I might not have seen unless I looked at my catalog

• Themes can help you identify and amplify bodies of work that you identify as something you enjoy, or tend to photograph.  Often when we look at our images, we don’t “see” across our portfolio.  We just see the latest shoot, trip or specific subject we are interested in.  If you have a theme that you are scanning for in your images, you can have a different view of your photographic catalog and see across dates, times and subjects.  If you can identify various themes in your work, that knowledge can inform you that this is something you are interested in, something you may want to continue going forward, gives you something to look for in the field, increasing your level of engagement on location.
  • One example of a long-running theme (or project) I have going is “circles”….finding and photographing natural and man-made circles.  Not sure what I’m going to do with this, maybe a book, but the finding and capturing has been an engaging side-effort to my main photography.
• Presenting various images around a theme gives more interest for folks to view your photographs.  You could share several photos of a particular subject, but if folks are not interested in that subject, they will pass your images by.  If you present various subjects all around a central theme, it gives more variety and visual interest to look at…plus having a “curated” collection shows you put the time and effort in to your presentation, so folks should pay attention.

Orange Theme

I was looking through my catalog a few weeks ago and noticed the color orange in one part of my catalog, so I thought I might try and pull together a few images around the color orange.  Notice they are vastly different images, yet, they are all brought together around a common theme.

How To Do Themes?

It’s easy, just think up something and look for images.  Or, as I did above, I just happened to notice “orange” and pulled a thematic collection together.  It’s really whatever you make it.  There are some things that can make your life easier for looking across your catalog.

• Keyboarding – When I import photos from a shoot, the first thing I do is keyword the newly imported images.  It is not glorious work, nor is it fun, but it pays off handsomely down the road when I want to search for images based on a word.  Say for example, finding all images with “rust” in them.  Or, “ocean” or “frost”.  There is no magic to keywords, it’s about how much time you have to do it and how much specificity you want to have on each photograph.  If you are not keyboarding now, I recommend you start
• Collection of finished images – Everyone has their own file system for managing their photos and storing them long term.  I’m not here to change that.  But if you don’t do this trick, I might suggest you start.  Every photo I develop, I save a lower resolution copy of the image in to one specific folder.  I use these low-res versions for social media, and various marketing things. HOWEVER, it is also a collection of all of my finished photographs which allows me to look at my entire body of work in one folder instead of having to click in to each date or location folder to see the finished images.

Rope Theme (or texture)

In the above, I picked an actual subject, ropes, to base a collection around.  I have a ton of rope images because they can do alot for me.  Repeating patterns, colors, textures, shapes, etc.  This was an easy one to pull together.

Vertical Subjects

I found some disparate subjects relating to verticality and pulled them together into a collection

Single Elements

Here is a collection of “single elements” in a photograph.  I wanted to find images with one central element and nothing much else going on around it.

These examples are just quick finds while scanning my catalog.  The sky is really the limit which what kinds of themes you can make.  The final question is then, what do you do with your themes?   Two quick answers come to mind

• Share your themes with friends or family on social media, email or in person with prints.
• Create an “at home” art show!   Find some wall space and some easy magnetic hangers, print a few of your themed images and hang them up in your home.  Every few months you can change out your showing by printing new photos.  I have 3 hangers near my desk and print 8″x12″ images and hang them up for my enjoyment, and, to see how they look in print.
• If you have enough images around a central theme, you can print a book to display on your coffee table, or give as gifts.  I have a collection of Rust images that I’ve printed 30+ copies of over the years as I’ve found people who love rust, or have sold at art shows.  Books are fantastic ways to immortalize your images in a presentation format.

I hope that after reading this you might look at your image catalog in a new light and find some energy for pulling together collections or themes of photographs.  Let me know in the comments below or drop me a note if you are finding success or need some help with this!