For the past year or so I have been working on a project looking at crime, poverty and life in between it all in Baltimore.  For the last few months I have been sort of wondering, trying to figure out the next part of the story I want to focus on and I have been sort of lost in all honesty.  I had a conversation with David Alan Harvey from Magnum and he offered some great feed back and advice.  We talked about a lot and at one point he said, “frankly i think a “small view” is a “big view”…trying to tell “everything” is always a mistake…you just want one tight essay….”, He went on to say that I should tell one story really, really well.

Harvey’s advice is obvious when you look at the reasoning behind it, but at first it seems counter intuitive because you want to talk about everything that is connected to it and for the viewers to be presented with the information.  Trying to please everyone is going to be the death of this project and I need to stick to the story I’M telling, my story, my vision.

It is obvious now that I am trying to do way to much for one essay and I now feel back on track.  All of the other stuff I have been shooting all make great stories and subjects on their own and I think they will have a time and place so I am going to keep working on those, but not with the emphasis of this project until it is completed. There are so many stories that can spin off of this one alone, something tells me I am going to have a lot of upcoming projects.