Make the Habit, Not the Project

Tom Wesselmann kept a nature journal for years alongside the paintings that made him famous. Paul Strand built a camera that lied about which way it was pointing. Picasso, after one afternoon in his friend's studio, produced nearly a hundred pasted-paper works in a matter of weeks. None of them set out to start something. That's the part worth sitting with.

The Habit Comes Before the Idea

There's a piece on AlternativePhotography.com by Peter J. Blackburn called "Making Practice Your Praxis", and its actual claim is smaller than most "make time for personal work" advice, which is exactly why it holds up. Blackburn isn't arguing that side work generates insight. He's arguing that practice, printing, shooting, working the process without a finished piece in mind, is closer to a musician running scales than to a project with a deliverable. You don't do it to produce something. You do it because doing it is the discipline.

That's a useful correction to how most of us talk about personal work. We frame it as a parallel project: pick a theme, shoot it consistently, build a body of work you can eventually show. That's fine advice, but it smuggles in a goal, and a goal changes what you're willing to try. The interesting cases in art history don't look like parallel projects. They look like habit that got interrupted by something worth keeping.

The Slow Burn:
What a Private Practice Reveals

Wesselmann's journal is the clean example. Contrasted against his "Great American Nudes," bold, social, unmistakably public work, the journal read, in the words of the critic who reviewed it for Artforum, like "a quiet, hermetic, apologetic side of himself that does not appear in his paintings." Nobody commissioned that journal. Nobody was going to see it. He kept it because keeping it was the practice, not because he was mining it for material. What it turned out to reveal, a version of the artist his major work had no room for, was a byproduct, not the point.

Photography has its own version of this, and it happened at a hinge moment for the entire medium. Alfred Stieglitz's circle at 291 had spent two decades making Pictorialism's case: soft focus, gum-bichromate printing, the deliberate hand-worked look that argued a photograph could be as constructed and intentional as a painting. Paul Strand was inside that tradition. Then he built a trick camera, a false lens with a right-angle prism bolted on, so it appeared to point one way while it shot another, to solve a specific, unglamorous problem: how to photograph strangers on the street without their self-consciousness getting into the frame. That's practice-level tinkering, not a manifesto. Stieglitz looked at the results and called them brutally direct and devoid of trickery, and used them to close out Camera Work. Strand's private solution to a technical annoyance ended Pictorialism as the dominant argument in American photography. You can read more about how that shift happened on Module 06 of my History of Photography course: Stieglitz, Steichen, and the handoff from hand-worked prints to straight photography is one of the clearer case studies in how an aesthetic movement actually ends.

The Trigger:
When Habit Meets a Spark

Picasso's papier collé phase looks, at first glance, like a different animal: fast, public, and immediately recognized as important, instead of slow and private like Wesselmann's journal or Strand's camera. But it's the same mechanism running at a different speed, and I think that distinction matters enough to name directly.

By 1912, Picasso was already famous, already prolific, already known for a work rhythm that didn't stop. He didn't need side experiments to protect his reputation; he had nothing to prove and nothing to hide. When Braque showed him a piece of wallpaper cut and pasted onto a charcoal drawing, Picasso, by his own biographers' account, immediately began his own experiments and produced close to a hundred pasted-paper works in short succession. That's not a planned campaign to found Synthetic Cubism. That's an already-running habit of constant production absorbing a new input at full speed. Within two years, what started as glued wallpaper had become Synthetic Cubism, reconstructing objects from fragments of real-world material instead of representing them, one of the two or three most consequential formal shifts in twentieth-century art.

Wesselmann and Strand ran their habit slowly, for years, without an audience. Picasso ran the same habit at speed, in public, triggered by someone else's move. Both are practice without an assigned outcome. The tempo is different. The mechanism isn't.

Answering the Case for Walling It Off

There's a real objection to all of this, and it deserves a straight answer instead of a dismissal. A piece on Fstoppers makes the case that personal, non-commercial work should be kept separate from, or entirely out of, the portfolio a photographer uses to book clients: "an abstract fine art series that has no commercial application does not belong in a portfolio aimed at booking commercial headshot clients." As positioning advice for a specific, immediate goal, landing a specific type of job, that's correct. A client evaluating you for a headshot campaign is risk-managing a hiring decision, not assessing your range.

But Picasso is the answer to why you can't extend that logic backward in time. The advice assumes you already know, at the moment you're making it, which pile a piece of work belongs in: commercial or personal, portfolio or drawer. Picasso didn't know that about the wallpaper scraps in the fall of 1912. Nobody sorts a habit's output correctly in advance, because the habit hasn't finished telling you what it's for yet. Wall off your personal work from your bookable work once you know what it is. You can't wall it off before you've made it, which means the practice itself, the unaccountable, no-deliverable, no-audience version of your work, has to exist somewhere the sorting logic doesn't reach yet.

What This Actually Asks of You

The useful version of this advice isn't "start a personal project." That's still a goal, and a goal still filters what you're willing to try. The harder, smaller ask is to protect a practice that isn't accountable to any project: no theme, no deadline, no plan for where it goes. Sandro Miller, forty-four years into a commercial career, put it plainly in an interview with Professional Photographers of America: "There has never been a time in my career when a personal project has not been going on." Not a project he was building toward something. A practice that was simply always running.

Whether that practice moves slowly, like a journal kept for years, or fast, like a burst of experiments after seeing someone else's idea, isn't the part you control. What you control is whether the habit exists at all before you need it to produce anything.

Sources and further reading

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