Should a Photo Project Start With an Idea or a Feeling?

Most advice on personal projects follows the same order: settle on a concept, write a rationale, set some rules, and only then pick up the camera. That sequence keeps a body of work coherent, though it can also screen out the images you keep returning to before you have any idea why they pull at you.

During his final year of university in 2001, Jamie Windsor became fixated on photographing the sky, with only faint traces of buildings or land creeping in at the edges of the frame. He had no reason for it beyond a vague unease the pictures gave him, a sense of menace that came from how little they showed. That was an unfamiliar way for him to work. His earlier projects had started with a clear message and predetermined criteria, moving in a straight line from idea to image. This time, he was working on emotion alone, and he even started logging the time and place of every sky he shot without being able to say why, since the information seemed arbitrary.

The explanation traced back to a flight to New York a couple of months after 9/11. As the plane approached JFK, the captain announced a diversion to Montreal because of "an incident" in New York. That incident was the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 in Queens, which turned out to be unrelated to terrorism, though nobody on board knew that at the time. Windsor's takeaway was that the context, and specifically the missing information, shaped the fear far more than the event itself. Pictures of planes that once suggested holidays suddenly carried a darker weight, and his sky photographs had been working through that idea long before he could put it into words. He thinks the sky became the vehicle partly because of its link to planes and partly because it's such a futile thing to document. The times and places he logged could have been true or false, and nobody could tell. The project ended up as a large poster cataloging skies from the places he'd been that year.

Clouds have carried this kind of weight in photography for about a century. In the early 1920s, Alfred Stieglitz began photographing the sky over Lake George in upstate New York, and the series he came to call "Equivalents" was meant to show that a photograph could hold a feeling independent of any recognizable subject. Many of those prints have no horizon and no sense of scale, yet they remain some of the most studied images of the 20th century. You can borrow the practical side of this without any art theory at all. Go back through a year of your own files and pull every frame you kept despite having no good reason to, then lay them out together on a single screen or a table of small prints. Patterns in light, subject, or mood often show up in a group that never show up in a single frame, and a cluster like that may be a project you started months ago without noticing. Give it a working title only after you've looked at it for a while.

Windsor points to how the Backrooms grew out of one photograph of an empty, yellowed office space that unsettled people online and later became a feature film. He also pulls out an anthology, "Everything Is Narrative" from Subjectively Objective, where work by 162 photographers with different subjects and styles somehow feels linked by atmosphere. Some photos impress him with composition, color, or timing. Others he simply feels, and those are the ones that stay with him longest, usually because he can't explain them right away.

That brings him to his current project in Bath, a series meant to feel unsettling through the absence of life. His rules are strict: golden hour or twilight only, no people, no cars, and no lights on anywhere, traffic lights included. Some frames that satisfy every rule still fall flat, while others land for reasons he can't pin down, and that gap has been bothering him. He looks at it through "killing your darlings," the habit of cutting work you've labored over when it doesn't serve the whole, and applies the idea to the rules themselves. A photograph that meets every criterion you've set isn't automatically a good one, and judging images by a checklist makes it easy to overlook whether they make you feel anything.

Windsor's full case for starting a project from a feeling is in the video above.