My work-life-art balance is all out of whack lately. I’ve found that while I’m still able to make new work on occasion, it’s proven difficult to really spend time with those new images and working toward a potential project idea. However, recently I’ve come across a little more downtime where I can passively research things while collecting images and planning future shoots.
Research, in my experience, can go one of two ways: easy or hard. I’ve had a hell of a time doing research for my work about Central Illinois, trying to figure out what all of these over 400 frames of 120 film are doing. Right now, that project is stuck as a pool of pictures and a very broad idea. In the opposite situation, I have had a much easier time researching for a project that focuses on my religious upbringing and my dissonant relationship to that. I’ve been able to find articles, books, other artists and art historians/theorists that have proven an ample amount of information to work off of. I’ve even been able to find plenty of musicians who make their songs about the things in religion that I am interested in exploring. All that to say, the pool for this work is much smaller.
Through the second project’s more successful research, I’ve been able to scout out many locations and potential contacts to make photographs in or of. Ideas kept rolling out of my head onto the page I have been writing on. This all made me excited to make new work — a feeling I haven’t had in a while. Even though I have been able to shoot nearly half of a thousand frames for my work in Central Illinois, I still struggle with the theory, the why and the what exactly of the project. That project is also much more bound by technical choices — using one film stock, one camera, one lens and one region of the state I grew up in (hold for my early childhood and elementary days in Michigan and Wisconsin — Illinois is where I spent the vast majority of my young life).
I found while wandering the corn fields that I was starting to hit a dead end with the area immediately surrounding my hometown — that I needed to expand. My last trip to Illinois was brief, visiting a sick family member before they passed. I was still able to shoot 7 rolls of film on that visit, where my last week-long trip in January 2024 provided twice the amount of rolls. Even with struggling to make images, I made it work through discipline and experimenting. When I returned from the recent trip, I began looking at what lies beyond the roughly 50 mile radius I had been working in - I wanted to see what of central Illinois I could work in close to the Mississippi River and the Illinois-Indiana border. While these areas are legally considered part of central Illinois, there are clear differences that I would need to address. the River feels very southern, almost looking like Missouri or Tennessee, while the East border is even flatter and feels more expansive than the middle of the middle of Illinois. With my next trip to the area being in October, I only hope my partner will be willing enough to tag along to drive around these rural areas.
One thing that any person with ADHD will understand is that bounding between ideas is par for the course. I was diagnosed later in life at about 26 years old, realizing that I have had it for much of my life. Perhaps this plays a role in my success with one project’s research versus the other. I take this as a lesson in that research for a project can really go so many ways but often times falls into that binary of having a great time, finding sources left and right and really getting a grip on how to proceed, and then the other side of struggling to find anything beyond the observable reality in front of us. It’s also perhaps that one project is much more theory based and introspective (as religious art tends to lean toward, no matter the perspective it takes), and the other project is very much as Paul Graham puts it, “The world as it comes at you.”
All this to say, do some research on what you work on — even if its difficult, you’ll learn a lot about what you’re making and what you could do with it. But always ask yourself, even if you don’t have an answer yet — Why are you making this work? Only you can provide that answer, and it will come in time.
