The Balcony Project: A Study in Limitations

Waikiki Beach

Photography is about limitations. By its very nature it is an art of exclusion- each time you press the shutter you are making a decision about what to include within the frame and what doesn’t belong. Technical limitations generally get the attention, focal length, sensor size, shutter speed, iso, but there are other limitations that are even more important.

 Van Gogh painted in spite of his personal struggles with mental health, continuing the paint throughout the year he spent confined to an asylum in Sothern France. His world became smaller, reduced largely to the asylum grounds, yet some of his most enduring work came from that season of limitation. His iconic Stary Night captures the night sky outside his asylum window. Limitations are not the enemy of creativity, often they can be a catalyst. Feeling stuck? Impose limitations on yourself (technical or otherwise).

 I have traveled with my children since they were babies and traveling with young children is…its own sort of adventure. It has its own geography, even as the world grows- exploring new places through the eyes of little people-  it shrinks around nap schedules and early bedtimes. Every trip included hours spent in hotel rooms waiting for little ones to  awaken, or fall asleep, or put on shoes (the amount of time spent putting on shoes is astonishing…). With a world waiting to be explored these limiting hours and limited geography felt endlessly restrictive.

 In these rooms the balcony project was born. I call it a project somewhat reluctantly, These photographs aren't especially cohesive. They weren't made with a shot list, a plan, or an artist statement. They'll likely never hang as a formal collection. Some belong to other bodies of work. Their only common thread is where they were made: from hotel windows and balconies, in the hours when I couldn't travel any farther. 

 I sat on my balcony, overlooking Waikiki beach, while my preschooler slept off a long day in the sun. I photographed that same shoreline nearly every day of the two weeks we were on the island: empty in the early pre-dawn hours, busy with swimmers in the afternoon sun, quiet and still as the sun set over the water. I stood on that beach, camera in hand, day after day, but it's this image, taken from the balcony while my little one slept, that remains my favorite. Weeks of unlimited possibilities folded into this little 4 foot balcony and became the image that best captures this iconic shore.

San Francisco, California

 Another favorite was taken out the window of the club lounge of the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco. A long day exploring, three hungry, exhausted kids, and the golden light as the sun began to lower across the bay. We retreated to the hotel club for snacks, hoping to make it back out once everyone recovered. While they ate I picked up my camera and photographed the city through the hotel window. This image, the one taken in a place I didn't want to be, at a time I didn't want to be there, was published in Fuji Life and remains one of my most popular images. This image wasn’t made in spite of limitations. It was made because of them.

 The same is true of my Water Colors series. A hotel balcony overlooking the Pacific. A tripod. A stack of neutral density filters. And one thing I had in abundance while waiting for a child to awake: time. I don't know that I would have stood still long enough to make twenty- or forty-minute exposures if I hadn't been confined to that room. But those quiet hours became the beginning of a series that I still return to whenever I'm fortunate enough to find myself overlooking the sea.

Pacific Ocean- Carmel Highlands, California

 My children are older now. They can outlast me exploring cities, and the photographs I make from hotel windows are no longer born from necessity, although I still make a point to slow down and really see what images can be made from within the boundaries of that home away from home. Years of limitation taught me to stop long enough to notice what was always there.

 As I write this, I'm sitting in my car waiting for one child to finish camp. Waiting has become its own landscape, one full of parking lots, ball fields, empty sidewalks, rows of parked cars catching the evening light. Is there another project hiding here in the mundane routines of everyday life?

 Photography will never be about reducing or escaping limitations. Every frame is a choice and every choice excludes something, in fact every frame excludes significantly more of the world than it includes. We accept limitations every time we pick up the camera, but some limitations bother us more than others. If we wait for the constraints to disappear before making an image, then we miss the photographs that are waiting inside of those limitations. And sometimes those images end up being favorites. Or they spark new ideas. Or the mark the beginning of new projects. There are photographs everywhere- if we refuse to be our own limiting factor.