These are the days when everybody talks about their new year’s resolutions. I mean everybody in the english-speaking world, I don’t think that italians do this often — but this will change (or may already have changed) because we seem to follow, like sheep, everything that americans do.
And I thought I was immune from these habits but here we go: I’m gonna make something this year, something not particularly original, something that countless other amateur photographers have done or are doing right now — a 365 project: one picture a day, on a specific theme. And the theme (as you can deduce from this post’s title) will be my daughter Valentina.
What’s important is that it will not be a personal project, in the sense that I will not pursue any artistic growth with this project; the idea is just to create something to leave to my daughter. A day-to-day documentary of this little girl, which I hope will be of some value to her.
Obviously, it will also be of incredible value to me, since I have alread experienced in this first and a half year of her life how fast she grows and I’m just amazed at the changes in her when I look back at photographs dated back one or two months. If it was a proper photographic project I would never be happy with some blurriness or bad framing or whatever else that I pursue when I do photographs for myself. In this way I free myself from this self-imposed constraints, will only shoot jpegs (no messing around in post production with raw files) and be happy with snapping one photo a day at my daughter.
It is also a personal declaration, a “resolution” (not this year’s resolution… a resolution for the rest of my life) to avoid abusing my daughter for my own personal projects, as too many photographers have done in the past (see for example Elinor Carucci, Sally Mann and “the reluctant father”).
At the end I would arrange all these 365 photographs in a book, documenting in fifty pages or more this entire year; I would then leave it on a shelf and let time pass until one day Valentina will discover it again, and see how much she’s changed during 2014.
