11 days, 33 meals

I really like the ‘photographic discipline’ of doing project work  – whether it’s commissioned work or self-assigned. A project obliges you to focus (pun intended) on achieving some pre-defined outcome – rather just firing off images in a sometimes random, opportunistic way (which tends to be my normal mode of operation!)

And, to achieve an outcome, you’ve got to think about it first, to come up with a plan about –

• about how to proceed in a technical sense,
• about how to stay on topic during the project, and
• about how the series of images created for the project will relate to each other and contribute to making up the whole.

A few years ago (well, 2005) I set about recording a week of my life around the cycle of daily meals. The idea was not to just do food photography (though that was part of the concept), but to record the social circumstances around each meal, and so produce a documentary slice of my life through the period that the project was running.

The working title was “7 days, 21 meals” but I found I was enjoying it enough, and still finding enough new angles to the project, to continue for another few days. So it became “11 days, 33 meals“. It was a busy and interesting time, with travel, work, visitors and meals out, and the project managed to capture a block of my life in a documentary way – albeit constructed around the culinary events of the 11 days!

You can see the results here, or view the selected 33 images in the short video above. I also printed the full set of images onto one large sheet of continuous photo paper, with a column for each day and a row for each of each day’s three main meals.

11 days 33 meals montage (printed 1.76 metres wide!)

After 11 days I decided I’d had enough of this project, and it was time to stop. I didn’t want to become obsessive about it – or to keep delaying my meals until the photo had been taken!

But there’s a growing body of ‘obsessive photo projects’ available on the web, from people who don’t want (or don’t know how!) to stop. Jonathan Kelller Keller has put together a list of many of them on his website. And he is no stranger to the genre himself, having conducted a remarkable daily self-portrait project for just about every day since 1998. He’s aligned the images in Adobe After Effects and put them together into a video in which you can watch him age 13 years over the course of 1 minute and 44 seconds. He has no plans to end the project which he says now has a life independent of his own.