What Ten Years With One Subject Can Teach You
Why does staying beat starting over?
The strongest photography advice is also the least exciting: stay. New subjects flatter you with novelty, but novelty is not depth, and depth is what separates a striking frame from a body of work. Photographer Ivan McClellan first encountered Black rodeo culture in Oklahoma in 2015, and instead of moving on to the next assignment, he kept coming back. Over more than a decade he built relationships with competitors and their families, photographing both the intensity of rodeo events and the lives around them. The result is Eight Seconds: Legacy in Motion, published by Damiani, collecting more than 90 previously unpublished photographs.
What does a decade buy that a weekend cannot?
Access, for one. The early frames of any project show what a place looks like; the later ones show what it means to the people in it. McClellan's portraits carry that difference: competitors at rest, families, quiet moments between events, a culture photographed from inside rather than observed from the fence. The book's title refers to the eight seconds a bull ride is scored on, a span where, as the book puts it, life and death are at stake. But the title works a second way: it is the opposite of the decade behind it. Eight seconds of action, ten years of showing up.
McClellan puts it plainly: he did not have to invent a Black cowboy superhero. He just had to show up with his camera. The people were already extraordinary. That sentence is worth sitting with, because it quietly reverses how most of us shoot. We go looking for something extraordinary to point the camera at. He stayed until the ordinary revealed itself as extraordinary.
Why it matters for you
You do not need a decade or a book deal to use this. Pick one subject you can return to: a market, a team, a street, a family. Go back four times instead of going somewhere new four times. The first visit gives you the postcard. The fourth gives you the photograph only you could have made, because only you kept showing up.