Serious photography happens usual in projects. One has an idea, develops a concept and then goes for it. It becomes more complicated, when you want to do a major project in a group. For most of us this is the first joint project, so a lot of additional things need to be considered:
What is the photographic style to apply?
How do we manage the legal stuff, e.g. the rights to publish pictures of individuals in times of heightened privacy legislation?
and lots of other questions …
So here is how we tackled the project.
FOR THE PICTURES WE DEFINED SOME REQUIREMENTS:
Color (B&W can be done later anyway, if necessary)
Landscape format
Knee to Head portraits (American format) or similar
Daylight photography, so no flashes or LED lights, but reflectors would be allowed
Different backgrounds that reflect the ‘Berlin vibe’, inside and outside
Different apertures from wide open 1.4 to closed down 11 to get the background either sharp or blurry
The subject looking straight into the lense or off camera
Individual persons, no groups - or the group in addition to individuals
The idea is to align on one visual concept.
Also, we want some more information about the people in the pictures. For any
audience looking at 195 pictures might be a bit boring after all. But when you
add a bit of the personal story to it, that changes (see also the famous project
‘Humans of New York’ by Brandon Stanton).
SO FOR THE BEGINNING WE HAVE ALIGNED ON THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS:
First and last name
Age
Place of birth (we have decided against citizenship, as these is often fluent these days)
Email address (we want to send the pictures and might have additional questions)
Then three content questions:
○ What was the nicest or most interesting thing you have experienced in Berlin?
○ What makes Berlin special?
○ What is your Berlin story?
○ Please complete the sentence: ‘Berlin is …’
We - and more importantly the people we take photos of - still struggle a bit with these questions. So we will continue to experiment to get the most interesting tidbits.
HOW TO EXECUTE THE PROJECT …
We have agreed to work in small groups of two people. That allows one person to ask questions and the other to take the pictures. To be honest: it is also very helpful for us photographers to step boldly forward and approach people on the street - that is not easy for most of us. Well, so much for leaving the comfort
zone … ;-)
For starters we will just approach people on the street, but we expect that eventually we need to actively search for people especially from nations with smaller populations. For that we might approach embassies, put out calls for participation on social media etc. Also we decided that we need this website as well as a flyer to explain the project to people. We also agreed that we would need a model release (this is basically a signed agreement that specifies what we are allowed to do with the pictures). Model release and the flyer can also be downloaded in the Download section.