SoFoBoMo: I don’t Get It.
I don’t get it. At all. To the point of feeling thick about it. I mean, last week-end, I spent 8 hours outside, with the single purpose of photographing. Light was fine, sky interesting, Spring at its best. I took 4 pictures, of which one would maybe qualify. I did not see anything else that I would feel really good about photographing. I could have taken way more, of course, but in my opinion at the cost of purpose. To me, a photo book’s main idea is to present the best we can do. Either as a given period ‘best of’ or our best shot at a given subject.
But SoFoBoMo is none of that. Indeed, on the project’s home page, it is explicitly written that photos don’t have to be good to qualify. The goal, and the only goal, is to produce a book in a month. Fill it with what you can produce in whatever little time you have in a month. Provided you complete the book in a month, it is a success.
That runs counter to everything I believe I take photographs for.
Consider this paragraph, taken from sofobomo.org:
"There’s no requirement that the photos be good. (but we suspect you’ll be surprised by how good yours are if you participate). There’s no requirement to have any text at all. And there is no requirement on quality of layout. There’s just three constraints: all the work must be done in one 31 day stretch that falls completely inside the two month window, the book must contain at least 35 photos, and you have to generate a PDF of the book. That’s it."
Can you believe this? They literally state they want to produce paper for the only sake of producing paper. Well, a PDF, which at least limits the waste.
And what completely baffles me is seeing photographers of whom I deeply admire the work doing that thing to the letter. They indeed produce a book in a month, but from what I have seen, a good part of the pictures in the book are below their usual excellent standard. In my opinion anyway.
Stephane :: May.11.2009 :: Artists, Photography, Pictures, Random Thoughts :: 6 Comments »
My thoughts exactly!
I’m not a photographer, I won’t be doing Sofobomo, but I would like to defend it a little from the perspective of having done NaNoWriMo.
Like Sobo, the emphasis is on meeting the bones of the challenge, ie a 50k word novel in 30 days… it isn’t about quality.
Some people can motivate and complete projects without such a challenge, some of us find it harder and an online challenge can offer us benefits:
- a fixed timescale, it might take over your life, but only for a month. That’s manageable.
- support and community. When the going is tough it can be a great help to know there are others going through the same thing, to hear how they are coping, share tips and strategies…. I found that the act of being encouraging to others gave me great motivation to practice what I was preaching.
- the making of a public statement of intent. For lots of us this is a great motivator.
-Process. I had harboured a notion of writing for years but was fairly clueless. The defined timescale helped me focus research on process and then I just had to take the leap and *do* it.
-Learning. I learned more about how to write by *doing* it than I ever would thinking about it, making tentative starts and thinking it wasn’t good enough and giving up…
Neither Nano nor Sobo *stop* people making/writing a book that takes longer, is more highly crafted, better. But they can give people the boost to get started. You may not produce the best work of your life, but you produce a step towards it. If you wait until you are ready to write a Booker winner you may never start. For many of us the best book is the one that we succeeed in getting *out* of our heads and into the world.
Thanks for taking the time to share your opinion.
Where I differ is that I would not be able to feel I have achieved something if the content does not matter.
Art means work, the process. But I think SoFoBoMo pushes the concept too far. I think it is a drive to create empty, superficial, “Mc Donald’s” art.
I think I could agree with you if anyone was suggesting that SoFo/Nano should exist in isolation or should be the extent of anyone’s ambition. I am not aware that they are.
Quality is not a criteria in these challenges, for who would judge it? The nano organisers make much of reminding people that the only person you can cheat in the challenge is yourself. So participants must judge for themselves if it is worth it to *them* to prioritise a completed project, for this one month, over the possible restraints on ‘the best they can do’.
If the challenges are of value to their participants, if they can find it part of their wider ‘process’, isn’t that enough?
“If the challenges are of value to their participants, if they can find it part of their wider ‘process’, isn’t that enough?”
Maybe. I just say I don’t understand it nor share the enthusiasm for the idea. Now, of course, if people have fun doing it, by all means, they should do it.
consider it an exam, do the best you can in the alloted time. You have been practicing your art for a long time, it is time to show what you can do.
or simply do not take up the challenge, that is OK as well.
For me it gave me the push to get something together, now I have 3 x 36 picture portfolios that I did not have before the ’08 challenge.