ROI: Field Notes of a modern professional

One of the interesting things about being an artist is that inspiration can strike when you least expect it.

I started this project when I began documenting my daily commute as a newly minted member of the workforce. Starting out in the working world is strange and new as a new grad and I used photography as a way to work through my frustration and disappointments with realities of adulthood, trying to find my way as a creative and dealing with “the daily grind.” Like many young people who enter the workforce, particularly those in the new millennium, the push to understand where I fit, and to find my place in the world was not just a central part of my personal and professional struggle over the years but had me seriously questioning if it was worth it, why continue doing things the same old way and was I really benefitting from all my hard “work” because it sure didn’t feel like I was.   

Inbound/Outbound is a series of visual notes that explore the modern professional experience through the lens of my commute over a period of 20 years. It reflects on what it means to me to be a modern professional by documenting the different commutes as an essential, an unpaid, part of every work and a reminder of the endless game we play.

What eventually took this from a casual experiment to a personal project were two key factors.  First, despite all my effort and intention, my career path seemed designed to go no where and eventually I pushed way off the path in 2008 during “The Great Recession.” Being forced to recalibrate the creative career path I had been working towards was kick in the head but bills don’t pay themselves, so it was how things had to be.

Second, I got my first smartphone.  This meant that as I was whiling away the hours of my day on transit or seated as a desk, in a very non-photographic office job, I was able to continue to develop my interest in photography which at the time was still very much in its infancy.    

This project evolved slowly, tangentially and over a long period of time. When it started out I was doing a lot of film photography and using a polaroid camera and/or a point and shoot. Eventually as I made money and went through photo school and expanded my photographic knowledge and technique, I was able to bring in different formats, more skill and switched back and forth between film and digital photography as I felt so inspired. It was only really when I got a smart phone that the idea of taking, or using my iPhone to take, “visual notes” to document my professional progress or lack thereof started to form.

The editing process for this project has been lengthy and is ongoing. The images by design are very different and disparate so creating a narrative with them was complicated. Some are much more documentary and some are much more experimental, but each have a different story attached to them which form an integral part of the much larger narrative.

Editing it down from thousands to under 100 was more like writing a personal essay, where just you have to be merciless in your edits and succinct in your word choice to keep it moving and keep people interested. This in itself proved a big challenge not just to create a logical visual narrative but to choose images that would help draw connections within the non-linear narrative.

To create cohesion between all the images and pay homage to both the Polaroids where the project began and the Instagram photos where I ended up I decided to use a square format for all of the images even the 21/4, large format and 35mm images because I wanted give them a visual continuity but also give the project a uniformity that would reinforce the monotonous nature of the work day.

At this moment in time when as so much continues to change very quickly particularly for those in the workforce. I think it is more important now than ever to think about what we do to earn a living, and how it helps shape our perspective of the world and what means to be “at work,”. It is my hope that by using my own professional journey as a backdrop this project encourages people to reflect on what it means to be a modern professional “making it” and how multifaceted that existence can be.