Navel gazing can get a little old, so, in the coming weeks (months?), as we find ourselves counting the hours till lunchtime on the sofa, we look for productive and creative ways to spend our days. In hopes of inspiring each other, we’ll be sharing some projects by photographers who have used the medium to explore the crevices and vistas of their home or neighborhood.
Earlier in this series we shared some of our favorite assignments from The Photographer's Playbook, one being Jason Fulford's story about photographing Saul Leiter. "We had just met that morning," he writes, "and he was wary of me, but polite. At one point, I was kneeling in a corner, interested in a stack of dusty boxes behind a chair. I started to slide the chair out of the way and Saul perked up, 'Ya can't move ANYTHING. Ya have to shoot THROUGH it.' I turned around and looked at him and we both started laughing, hard. But he was serious."
Within the confines of home, we may be frustrated by the lack of space to photograph. It can be tempting to neatly frame and remove what we regard as obstacles, but we only have to look to Saul Leiter to remember that an image can offer more perspective if the shot is obscured in some way. Saul Leiter's "In My Room" is an intimate series of portraits of his favorite subjects taken over three decades. While we may not all be as lucky to be sheltered at home with our muse of the moment, the photographs offer inspiration for how we can capture photographs in small, even cramped, spaces.
See more from our Sheltering in Place series here.
