In a few weeks’ time, on May 21st, it is once again time for a one-day event called Planket (The Plank), where a bunch of photographers show photographs in a park in Malmö. I’ve done this event a few times now and it is always a lot of fun, both to show your own stuff to the general public as well as seeing what other photographers do.
This year will be the first time it's held in May, rather than its usual August. We’re also in a slightly new location, inside the park, rather than along a busy bikepath just on the outside of the park. I don’t know how many people will be near our images during the day - there’s a big Climate Festival going on in the park at the same time - but either way it will be exciting to take part!
What should I show?
That is the tricky part...coming up with a theme for your “show”. I have done the “show a few pictures you like with no connection between them” before and that is not exactly ideal. It is (almost) always better to have a coherence between your images, if only a very tenuous one.
"The Plank" in 2011
I toyed with showing a few selections from my ongoing Instagram 365 project, but that didn’t feel very much like a collection. Those pictures are by the very nature of the project very diverse - I do different pictures depending on what happens on the day, so I didn’t think it’d be a good one. I also thought about picking a few shots from my “Graffiti Square” project, where I take closeup pictures of graffiti I find when I am out and about. I take them so close that they become colorful abstracts rather than showing what the graffiti painter had in mind to show, but that didn’t feel quite right either. It's not that I don't think it's a coherent collection, I’m just not fully through this project in my mind to make a show of them...yet.
One of the images that I'll show in two weeks' time on Planket.
In the end, since my “plank” neighbor (i.e. my father) has decided to show some quite colorful documentary shots from a Viking reenactment last year, I’ve decided to go “old school” this year. After Nik Software made the Nik Effects collection free of charge I’ve toyed around with their various effects and I’ve come up with a number of images that I hope harken back to the earlier parts of the last century. I’m not claiming that they look exactly like wet plate photos, but more that there are hints of such images and styles from yester years.