How to document a creative stay: photos, captions and a daily log

What to take away

What to photograph

Most people come home with the view and the finished work. Neither tells the next artist whether the bench is tall enough.

Shoot the workspace as you found it, then mid-project with the mess in frame. Shoot each stage, failures included, and the materials with their labels readable.

Then shoot the conditions: light at different hours, the bench, the storage, the weather. Add the route from bed to studio to supplier, and the finished work on a plain background.

Two or three images in each of those categories is a record. Four hundred images of the same corner is not.

Familiarity is what defeats this. By week two the narrow doorway and the window that only works in the morning have gone invisible, and those are the details the next person books around.

Caption the same evening

Ten minutes nightly: what the image shows, the date, what was happening, what you learned. Skip it and the folder becomes a pile you never reopen.

The National Endowment for the Arts runs its arts data profile series on the same principle. Each collection is dated, numbered and summarized, so a figure can be traced back to its source years later.

Keep a working log beside the images

One line a day: hours worked, what was made, what went wrong, what you spent. Over a fortnight that tells you more about your own working pattern than any amount of reflection afterwards.

It also makes the account credible. An essay calling a residency productive is a claim. A log showing nine working days out of fourteen is evidence.

Keep it offline-capable and copy it into the image folder weekly. A log that lives only in an app you abandon is a log you will not have in two years, which is when you will want to compare one stay against another.

A worked example: the fourteen-day log

Say a two-week stay costs a fee of F, travel of T, and materials of M. You log fourteen entries.

Nine working days out of fourteen, at (F + T + M) / 9 per working day. That number is the one a funder or an editor can check, and it is the one you will want before booking the next stay.

Write it up later

Wait until the follow-up period ends, usually three to six months, then write. Include the money, the working days, what went unfinished, and what happened to the work afterwards.

If the account is meant to reach editors or funders, treat the writing as its own task. The Small Business Administration's guidance on writing a press release that gets results makes the point that a release is now read online by far more than journalists, and that its conventional parts exist for a reason.

A residency write-up works the same way. The specific, checkable parts are what get read.

The analysis of what case studies reveal covers what most accounts leave out, and the photographer's list for avoiding retreat mistakes covers backup discipline.

Common questions

How much should I photograph?

Enough to reconstruct the working conditions, which is usually about twenty images a week. Conditions first, finished work last.

Do I need permission to photograph the site?

Ask the host, and ask each person separately before they appear in a frame. Rules on photographing identifiable people vary by jurisdiction, so check with the relevant privacy or copyright authority where you are working.

What if the work failed?

Document it. Accounts of stays that went badly are rarer and more useful than accounts of stays that went well, and the failure is usually the part that transfers.

Should I post as I go?

It changes how you work, and most people find they document better in private and publish afterwards. If you post during the stay, keep the captions factual and dated.