Making a Photobook #3

How do you begin editing 800 photographs into a photobook? For more than 40 years, I’ve photographed along Massachusetts Avenue and in the neighborhoods surrounding it in Boston. I’m now working to turn that archive into The Mass Ave Project—and one of the first challenges is figuring out what, exactly, I have. In this episode of The Crit House, I asked two close friends and fellow photographers, Edward Boches and Dan Weingrod, to look through roughly 800 photographs and tell me what they saw. https://www.bochesphotography.com https://www.danweingrod.com I wasn’t asking them to choose the photographs for the book. I wanted their perspective: What patterns do they see? Where am I repeating myself? What kinds of photographs seem essential? And, perhaps most importantly, what do they see in the work that I may not see myself? Their responses raised an even bigger question: What is The Mass Ave Project actually about? The physical street? The neighborhoods and people surrounding it? The changing city? Or is the project also about my own relationship with this place—and the way I’ve learned to see it over four decades? This episode follows those conversations as I begin the next stage of the process: taking approximately 800 photographs and trying to get them down to a more manageable 400. It’s not the final edit. It’s the beginning of learning how to edit the work at all.