Project Order

Progress book design

In the ongoing project, “Project Order”, I explore photography’s other side of narrative: I ask participants to randomly select six photos from the photos I took, arrange the photos, and tell me a narrative from this arrangement. Arranging the photos in a meaningful way that speaks to the audiences is something I’ve always been struggling with, and the project broadened my imagination of the diverse ways of interpreting photography not only as a photographer behind the camera. Through the project, I want to let people truly interact with the photos, not like in a museum setting where audiences passively accept the arrangement and text interpretation of the photos, but a chance to create their own narrative. I view the project as a collaboration between me and the audience. After collecting the narratives and arrangement, I designed the book with the layout that represents my interpretation of the participants’ narrative using a grid system.

The book, however, only marks a milestone of the project but not the end. The next phase of the project is a public participatory installation. I will print the photos in smaller sizes in a greater number, put them in a bag, and ask pass-bys to randomly pick three photos and write their thoughts on the photos with one word or one sentence, then pin the photos and their words on the nearby wall. This will be a larger scale experiment of the possible interpretation of photos, and more importantly, a participatory photography work that allows communications to go back and forth.

09/2021-12/2021