The Case for Building Photography Around Projects

Most photographers hit a stretch where the work stops exciting them, direction disappears, and the whole thing starts to feel like a chore. Those flat periods are often what push you toward something new, if you know where to look.

That flat feeling is the starting point for a project-based approach that Kyle McDougall walks through in this video, drawn from his own 20 years behind the camera and the times he questioned whether he was still interested in photography at all. McDougall builds his current practice around running several projects at once, and he makes the case that a specific focus and a set of limitations tend to generate creative ideas rather than restrict them. He argues that even a subject that's been photographed to death still leaves room for your take, because your vision, your image choices, your sequencing, and the way you package the work make it yours. To display his own in-progress work online, he built a section on his Squarespace site where he can watch a series come together and experiment with sequencing. The point holds whether your idea is playful or serious, grand or small.

His first and most heavily emphasized point is authenticity, meaning you photograph the thing that genuinely pulls at you and stop talking yourself out of it. McDougall is honest that "shoot what excites you" sounds thin as advice when the whole problem is not knowing what excites you, so he reframes it. Ideas rarely arrive from a long session at your desk. They reveal themselves after months of getting out and making work, and he points to Slate City, his ongoing documentation of the slate history and landscapes of North Wales, which only took shape after a couple of years of shooting without knowing where it was going. A newer example started last week, when he shot two chapel interiors in Wales on his Mamiya 6 with color film and realized there was a long-term typology project in disused Welsh chapels. Neither came from planning. Both came from showing up.

There's a useful principle sitting underneath all of this that's worth pulling out on its own. McDougall's projects grow because he keeps returning to the same places and lets the meaning accumulate, which is the opposite of how most people shoot now. The dominant rhythm online rewards the single strong frame, posted, judged by engagement, and forgotten. A project rewards patience and repetition, the same subject revisited until connections you couldn't have predicted start to surface. That's a different muscle, and it's one that documentary and fine-art photographers have relied on for decades. If your feed feels like a treadmill of one-offs, committing to a body of work over months is a way to break the loop, and it fits especially well if you keep returning to the same region, the same commute, or the same overlooked corner of where you already live.

He also makes the case that ideas are everywhere and even a small subject tends to expand once you dig into it. His example is a replica of the Atlantic Wall near him, built by Canadian and British forces to rehearse breaching defenses ahead of the D-Day invasion. What looked like a limited subject, a single wall, opened up after a chance conversation with a local filmmaker and World War II historian named David, who drafted an outline connecting the failed raid at Dieppe, blueprints smuggled out of France in a biscuit tin, and accounts of plaster falling from local ceilings during explosive tests. Suddenly the project stretched across countries and objects. McDougall rounds out the video with a point about creating something that doesn't yet exist rather than hunting for a ready-made subject, and a closing argument for using photo books as fuel, though the specific titles and how he reads each one are worth hearing in his own words.

Press play on the video above to hear McDougall lay out the remaining points and the photo books behind them.