I should probably start this by saying that i’ve never been good with deadlines. I’ll get into that in a bit.

For the last three and a half years of my life, I’ve been spending just about all of my spare time trying to meet 1000 different people, take their portraits and share a bit about them on social media.

It originally started as an idea to try and improve my portrait work.

These were my planning notes in early-2016. Pop along to my Portraits page to see this photo idea executed. Pls note the edginess of the beer bottle - it kept rolling away.

For a bit of context, I was working at the Mail News Group at the time in Healesville.

I started work at the paper in October 2012 while midway through a journalism degree. The paper was (and is) run by a lovely bunch of people, but a very small bunch of people, so it became very clear after starting that if you wanted a nice photo to run alongside the story you were writing, chances were you’d have to go out there and take it yourself. Fair deal.

This added a whole new dimension to the experience of working at a small town paper - it meant that you’d almost always be seeing things firsthand, or at least having conversations face-to-face, because if you were writing a story you were really interested in, and you wanted your reader to share that interest, you wanted to get a good, eye-catching image to go with it.

I’ve been keen on taking photos since I got my first camera, my first camera phone, my first SLR, so this was a great opportunity to grow my knowledge here.

The sad part of this was that, when I started at the paper, I had absolutely no idea how to work a camera further than turning it on and pressing the shutter.

Before my time at the Mail, my photos were a bit like this:

Pls respect Jesse Graham Photography circa 2012 by not photographing this extremely public place.

I learned a lot on the job, and started getting a bit more confident in my skills in taking photos and learning my way around manual settings, but there was still a pretty huge divide between the image I envisioned in my head and what ended up on the screen.

And I need to say here, I have a very unreliable history with deadlines. Over my four-or-so years at university, much to my own detriment, I don’t think I ever handed in an assessment piece within the given timeline. Doing an arts degree, you were still given a penalty for each overdue day, but the penalty was pretty small compared to the comfort I got from having extra days to work on pieces I had been procrastinating. And I eventually graduated (while working at the Mail full-time for the second half of said degree).

[Side note - if you’re at uni and planning on handing your things in super late, definitely let the tutor know or you’ll cause them a bunch of stress and you won’t be their favourite person. Believe me.]

My photos also improved in this time:

This is a photo of my buddy Ally in Healesville - overlooking the location of my gorgeous logo'ed photo above.

Obviously, in journalism, deadlines are at the heart of the work you do along with (among the myriad of considerations that you take into account when looking at a story) its timeliness. If you don’t meet your deadline on a critical story, the story quickly begins to lose relevance.

Working at the paper, I learned to prioritise to meet those deadlines. Luckily, it was a weekly newspaper, so I had time to prepare my work. Unluckily, my procrastination meant that Mondays would begin at about 8am and I wouldn’t stand up from my chair or look away from my screen until 2.30pm came around and the newspaper had to be ready for printing. But the paper went out every week and the big deadline, for four and a half years, was met each week (give or take a few hours).

But I also learned that some things have to wait. Sometimes, the deadline set for you doesn’t work for what you’re doing, and that usually means going back to the drawing board or figuring a way out of the mess - how to fill the newspaper pages - while juggling a bunch of other stories on the backburner.

While I was at the Mail, I decided I needed to work on my photography. From 2014-2015, I undertook a photo-a-day project, starting and finishing on 6 April. The first photo, from memory, was of a flower out the back of the Mail’s office, which was in proper bloom. I’d just bought a 50mm prime lens and essentially never took it off the camera, so I was excited to dive into taking a photo each day, editing it and uploading it before the clock struck midnight.

If you only knew how far back I had to scroll on Instagram to find this.

The immersion had an amazing impact on my confidence with a camera. Because I was forcing myself to take a photo each day - and because I really didn’t want to have too many similar images when it wrapped up - I was learning how to navigate different lighting, situations and subjects. I even went to Europe towards the end of it and had plenty of practice in street photography.

I don’t have any jokes here - this place is literally just called Spaghetti and the pasta there was some of the best of my life. Fly to Italy, check it out.

That project taught me a lot. I learned how to use manual settings, all about aperture and shutter speed, about ISO (and its limitations on my little camera), about how to see things to photograph and the angle to photograph them with.

I also learned very quickly that taking, editing and uploading a photograph every day was extraordinarily difficult and at times unpleasant.

I remember a few nights, feeling deliriously sick and tired, driving around the back streets of Healesville with a tripod and camera on the passenger seat, scouting for anywhere I could pull over and take some photos, then semi-deliriously getting the photos to my phone and popping them up on Instagram before collapsing. There’s definitely something to be said about the fact that to improve, you’ve got to go out of your comfort zone, because some of the photos I took back then (I think at least) still hold up pretty well today.

Luv u forever, Haz Paz (jokes aside, I have this tattooed on my stomach). Also I decided to go further to Lillydale Lake for this. It was very cold.

But I do my enjoy free time and the photo-a-day project ate into a bit of that.

So I finished that project on 6 April, 2015, with two very close friends down on the Mornington Peninsula. It came in on time pretty much perfectly.

If this seems pixelated, it’s because I had to scroll back to 2016 on my Instagram to screencap this. Gr8 file management.

I spent the next year thinking about what would follow, but the idea came pretty early on - I’d taken a heap of photos over the year, but I always loved portraits and I knew what I did next had to be something to help me grow my skills there, so I could make that my career path in photography.

I also wanted to avoid having to take a photo every single day (and thus, avoid some of those sickly photoshoots or pushing myself) while producing a significant body of work.

One hundred portraits was too easy, I figured. I could get through that number with friends, family and people around me. A thousand portraits sounded huge. It sounded difficult and impressive, and it also happened to work out pretty nicely with a timeframe of about three years (1000 portraits / 1095 days).

So, after chatting to my close friends (where a few of them pointed out - in an endearing way - that my go-to move is dreaming up huge concepts that I couldn’t possibly deliver on. Grand Graham Ideas was the term that they coined), I decided to just dive in, commit to 1000 portraits over three years and organised a quick shoot with one of my best friends, Andrew.

The portrait that started it all - my buddy, Andrew.

Since then, I’ve photographed more than 670 people. I’ve posted 449 of those people’s portraits to Facebook and shared various stories about them or from them. I’ve had people have second thoughts and pull out of the project, others who I’ve fallen out with, whose portraits I removed out of respect for the situation. Both of these things are totally fine - this whole thing started as a photography project, but it’s all about the people and, by extension, their consent to be part of this.

At least three of the people I’ve photographed to date have passed away.

Sue Contarino, my old high school teacher and the founder of Walk With Me (a walk to raise money for Ovarian Cancer research). A brilliant, thoughtful, kindhearted person.

I’ve held my first ever solo exhibition, entirely about the project, with 19 printed works and 500 portraits in a video installation. One of my portrait subjects, who I met briefly in Bourke Street when I said I liked his coat and asked to take his photo, turned up to the exhibition a year after his photo was taken, and caught up with me as we walked around the gallery on opening night before the event began.

I’ve had offers to shoot weddings, paid jobs come out of a free portrait shoot, people who have insisted on paying for their portrait (this is extremely humbling but always appreciated) and some people I’ve worked with have used their portraits for LinkedIn and then moved along to new jobs - the CEO of Bass Coast Shire Council (former Director at Yarra Ranges Council), Ali Wastie, has my portrait of her as her display picture at the moment, which is a bit exciting. I’ve gone to events or seen photos from events where my photos have been used for headshots or banners. I’ve even got a subject or two living overseas who still follows along.

All of this is wonderfully, wonderfully humbling. And the project itself has evolved as it has run. When it began, it was all about taking and sharing the photo, sharing a small snippet of information about how I knew them and how I was taking their photo (with a bit of technical info). This was when I was working at the paper, when a lot of the portraits came out of a news story I was writing about.

Healesville and District Historical Society President, Kevin Mason (who also worked for 50 years at Healesville Sanctuary), photographed while I was working on some historical articles.

Now that I’ve moved to Yarra Ranges Council, and the project went into full swing, it became pretty apparent that people - myself included - wanted to hear more about the person, rather than just a brief bit of information about why they were in front of my lens.

My partner took me to see Brandon Stanton from Humans of New York when he came out to Melbourne, and he spoke a lot about the conversations he has with people and some of the things that come out of that when you listen and ask. By that point, I was hundreds of portraits in, and I hadn’t really taken the time to chat with the subjects in any official or recorded way. So I started doing that, usually asking them the same three questions:

What’s one of the best things that’s happened to you this year?
What’s something you have a hard time with?
What’s something you’re looking forward to?

Sometimes, you get the same answers from people - a very strong reoccurring theme from people was finding time to spend with family was hard, and something they thought about a lot - but you always get a good insight into who they are as a person.

That’s just as important as a great photo for the person viewing it, and both the photo and the text inform each other - a great photo is made all the better when you have a real, honest bit of information in that person’s words. In a few ways, it’s made me feel like the project is veering into Humans of New York/Humans of Melbourne/Humans of Paris/Humans of (city) territory. That’s not a bad thing, because the reason why those pages and the idea behind them is successful is because people appreciate the honesty, that insight into another person - sometimes what they see and read resonates with them, sometimes it’s completely alien to them, but it’s almost always a moving experience, or at least one that captures their attention.

The hard thing to reconcile is that I hadn’t originally planned for that in the project - I primarily started to improve my portrait photography, to overcome a lack of confidence when meeting and photographing strangers, to meet new people and to give each of them a nice, high quality photo to keep.

I think as the project’s continued, I’ve managed to achieve those things quite a lot. And I love how the project has now evolved to bring in an interview component. I think think each of the portraits is more significant for being accompanied with the words of the subject (where I can get it - getting back in contact can be difficult a year or so on. If you’re one of my early portrait subjects reading this and want a re-hash, hit me up!).

Now, if you haven’t gathered from the headline, the fact that it’s been three and half years and the fact that I’ve taken 670 portraits, my deadline has shifted considerably since I started out.

There’s a few reasons for this.

In early 2016, a few months before the project begun, I had the chance to meet some of my favourite photographers and photojournalists at The Age, when they held a portrait photography workshop.

I spoke to one of the photographers there, after taking his portrait, and mentioned my idea. He very gently advised me against it, saying that the quality of the portraits might fall by the wayside in getting the quantity done.

I’ve thought about that conversation a lot since then.

Sure enough, the photographer was right - I’m certain I could have knocked out 1000 portraits in the three years if I’d thrown myself into it a bit more. But I’m very doubtful as to whether I’d have gotten the same quality as I have now that I’ve slowed down with my shooting and tried to think a bit harder about getting the right lighting and how the image should look by the end.

That’s not to say that it’s not still me flying by the seat of my pants, but I try to think and plan out my shoots a bit more, to keep it interesting, to grow my skills and try things that put me back out of my comfort zone.

Another big reason is I’m spending more time getting in contact with subjects I photographed a while back, to see how they’ve been, to offer them a new portrait shoot where possible, and to ask them those questions above, so their post isn’t just an old photo of them, but a photo from a point in time and some words that represent where they are now with their life.

I’ve also started to work more in photographing people on film alongside my digital portraits. I remember when I started this project, I made the comment to a friend that I’d love to do a shoot with someone in the project that was done completely on film (along with a few done completely on Polaroid/instant film). I’ve done that a few times over, and got some results I’m really happy with - albeit with a bit of a longer turnaround time than a digital shoot and edit.

My buddy, Janelle. One of the most solid film portraits I’ve ever taken (and one of the most solid-ly excellent folks I know)

As a result, I realised a little while back that the three year deadline I set for myself just wasn’t going to work. Not for my work/life balance and definitely not for my mental health.

So I pushed it back.

The mentality, quite honestly, is the same one that I applied to university assignments running overtime (even though my tutors kinda hated it) - I’d rather have the certainty of the extra time to get good work done than the pressure of a deadline forcing me to create something I’m not proud to put my name to.

So it looks like the project will be set to wrap up by the end of the year. Or thereabouts, anyway - as I write this, I’ve got about 320 more portraits to gather.

So let’s call it April 2020, four years after I started (but don’t hold me to that).

But either way, it’ll get done. And the portraits will be good. Even though the deadline I originally set passed by a while ago.

Thanks for reading. And if you’re one of the 670-odd lovely people who has given me their time and permission to take their portrait, thank you. It genuinely means the world to me.

- J

Once I’m done, I might spend some time here.