With a themed photo project you look at the world in a new and different way. Laura Vink tells us about her photo projects.
Traveling through Tanzania, the idea for a photo series came to Laura Vink quite suddenly: laundry hanging out to dry on a clothesline. “It must have been the combination of colors, location and the huge contrast between the clotheslines and the way I dry my clothes at home—in the dryer—that gave me the idea for a series,” Laura says. “Moreover, a photograph of clothes hanging out to dry speaks volumes about the people who live there and how they live.”
From Tanzania onward, the series grew, as Laura photographed clotheslines in other countries, too. She’s noticed it has changed the way she looks around her, even when she doesn’t have her camera. “I notice clotheslines wherever I am,” she says. “Although I don’t photograph them as often any more, I can’t resist a good clothesline. Once I startled my boyfriend by yelling ‘Stop!’ when we were on the road in Austria: I had seen a beautiful clothesline and just wanted to take a picture.”
Another well-known theme on Instagram is ‘From where I stand’: a picture of your feet, taken from above (#fromwhereistand). Laura, too, uses this theme for an ongoing series. “Because I have lots of pairs of All Stars in different colors, the pictures come out in a nice range of colors and also gives me a good excuse to buy a new pair in another color,” she says. “Taking themed photographs is a fun challenge: When you are taking lots of pictures on one theme the trick is to get each picture to be just that little bit different.”
- You can read the complete article ‘Photograph a door a day‘ in our special Flow 19 Days of Mindfulness.
Text Caroline Buijs Photography Laura Vink (@Lauravink)
