April
Witness
Photography is an act of bearing witness. This month, four prompts push you to photograph with presence and intention: other people, overlooked places, traces of the past, and a full day of your own life.
Unseen
Photograph someone or something that exists in plain sight but goes unnoticed. The overlooked person on a busy street, the building everyone passes without looking up, the object that has been in the same spot so long it has become invisible. Your job is to make the viewer see it for the first time.
Eye contact
Make a portrait of a person, an animal, or even a statue where the subject meets the lens directly. Something shifts when a subject acknowledges the camera. Sit with that tension and decide what you want it to mean.
Evidence
Photograph the trace of something, not the thing itself. A worn path, an empty chair, a window with condensation, a meal half eaten. Show what was there without showing it.
A day in the life
Choose one day this month and document it fully, from the moment you wake up until right before you fall asleep. Aim for at least one photo an hour. You are not trying to make it look good. You are trying to make it true.
Artist spotlight
Zanele Muholi
A South African visual activist and photographer whose work centers on Black queer identity, visibility, and dignity. Their series Faces and Phases and Somnyama Ngonyama are among the most powerful bodies of documentary portraiture of the past two decades — work that is explicitly about the act of witnessing and being witnessed. The connection to this month's theme is direct and intentional.
March
In Between
March sits mid-stride, not quite one thing, not yet another. Work with the threshold, the almost, the incomplete. The ambiguity is a feature, not a bug.
Caught mid-change
Find something that hasn't finished becoming what it's going to be. A bud that hasn't opened. A building half-demolished. A face mid-expression. The incompleteness is the whole point — fight every instinct to wait for it to resolve and shoot it as-is.
Threshold
Doorways, shorelines, the edge of a shadow, the moment before someone walks through a door. A threshold implies both sides at once, and your job is to put that tension in the frame.
Neither here nor there
Dawn or dusk? Joy or grief? Abandoned or just quiet? Find a scene that refuses to be one thing and don't try to fix it in post. Ambiguity is a feature, not a bug.
Before it's gone
Steam off a coffee. Chalk on a sidewalk before it rains. That look someone gives right before they realize you're photographing them. Find something small and impermanent and make it last.
Artist spotlight
Saul Leiter
Leiter spent decades photographing New York through rain-streaked windows, around reflections, in the margins of scenes where the real action had already happened or hadn't quite started yet. His images are soft, layered, and deliberately hard to read — and all the better for it. If you've never come across his work, clear your afternoon.
February
Limited Light
As the days get shorter, light becomes limited and more intentional. Work with those conditions using motion, stillness, and unconventional light sources to shape meaning. The goal is not to fight the light, but to notice what changes when it fades.
Show motion
Light trails, blurred commuters, soft water. Use a slow shutter speed to show motion. You'll need a steady hand, tripod, or solid surface. Can't control your shutter speed? Think creatively about other ways to suggest movement.
Unconventional light
Some of the most interesting light comes from unconventional places — a bonfire, a TV set, car headlights. The main light source should come from something other than the sun or standard light bulbs.
One light
One artificial light source only. A table lamp or phone flashlight will do just fine. Subject is up to you — no cheating with multiple sources.
Still, Life
Interpret as you will. Still life the genre. Life being still. Life still going on. However you read this, you do you. The ambiguity is intentional.
Artist spotlight
Gordon Parks
Parks used low light as a narrative tool rather than a limitation. Working largely in available light, often indoors or at night, he embraced shadow, contrast, and darkness to convey emotional weight and social reality. His photographs show how restraint in light can heighten intimacy, tension, and meaning.
January
Getting Started
Four prompts chosen to help you feel motivated, engaged, and intentional about the year ahead. All focused on helping you identify how to make the most of the project.
Setting goals
Think about what you'd like to achieve this year. Set a goal and make a photograph which demonstrates it. You'll revisit this midway through and at the end of the year.
Your passion
Make a photo that shows what you love. Be as concrete or abstract as you like. Highlight what makes this your passion so a viewer can interpret your relationship to it.
Something familiar
Find something you interact with every day and photograph it from at least ten different angles. Choose the best one. What's mundane to you may be fascinating to another.
Past experiences
Show where you are in your photographic journey. Wildlife, portraits, street, sport — photograph what you like, how you normally would. You have free range here.
Artist spotlight
Martin Parr
Known for vibrant colors and hyper-real documentation of the everyday. Often comical, his well-placed colors elevate the mundane to something with true character. We lost Martin last month, and as he's been an enormous inspiration, it felt only right to start the year with him.