About this time last year I completed my first long term project. As many of my readers probably already know, I folded 1,000 paper cranes over the course of a year, for the sole purposes of photographing them on fire in the snow. I even made a super secret blog about it, that somehow has collected a little over 100 hits in the last 2 years despite me never telling anyone about it. But of course, I also took a bunch of pictures of the process - that I then never showed anybody.
These are those pictures.
Through out the year that I was working on them, the folding process became an integrated part of my life. There was always work to be done, and I could see how my small stack of 10 cranes, eventually grew into larger, and less space friendly mounds. About half the time I was working on this, I thought I was either crazy, or going crazy. If you knew me back then, I'm sorry, because I probably at one point or another talked your ear off about this project. But here, for the first time is the full story behind Senbazuru.
This was the beginning of the end, the last sheet of 8"x 8" in., hand torn, squared paper piece of white printer paper was destined to become number 1000th of 1000 paper cranes. In some asian cultures it is believe that one who folds 1000 cranes, will be granted a wish by the gods. But of course the catch is must die in order to carry your wish up to heaven, for the gods to receive. In other words, blood and sweat must be sacrificed in exchange for your wish. Sounded like a good deal to me, so I thought that instead I would speed up the process and burn mine. 
My goal was specifically to fold 1000 white uniform looking paper cranes. But after the first 50 or so, I felt the work was too tedious and boring, and started drawing on them to keep myself entertained. Eventually I figured out that when I unfolded a crane, the crease marks on the paper became a perfect blueprint for how the crane would come out in the end. I could clearly see which corners would become the head, tail, and wings. So I started designing different unique cranes, each one with it's own style, concepts, and ideas. Of course there were a lot of terrible ones, but I think this was one of my more successful attempts.
This was one of my earlier ideas for the cranes. I knew already that so long as I had a larger number of them uniform size and shape, that they would look cool no matter how I photographed them. But I wanted to double check, so I folded a couple of small ones out of left over paper and took a picture of them on my mom's kitchen counter. 
This was the first pile of 100 cranes that I made. The first hundo were actually the easiest to do - because I was still motivated. That quickly changed, with the more that I did. I ended up working on this project very sporadically throughout the year. I would try to fold 10 a day (which takes me about 40 minutes) but that pace would only last about 4 days, before I got bored and stopped. Somedays I would feel guilty and fold 30 in a day. This all changed when my deadline started approaching, and I still had 400 left to fold in a month. Some people would call that "procrastination," I call it "gradual motivation."
Shortly after making that pile of 100, I realized I needed a way to store them. So I mostly kept them in trash bags and left them around my room. This system started out ok at first, but quickly became a problem as I eventually would have start storing multiple bags in locations.
Cranes detail.
Eventually when I hit 500, much in my life had changed. The project had also consumed my free time, so I created this image in celebration of reaching the halfway point. This was one of the early hits on my blog, where I actually got a great response from people about my work. From this point forward, I actually started to feel like I was onto sometime worthwhile.
A lot of people ask me about how I make my pictures, and the previous image in particular. While most of the work I do now is often obviously photoshopped, they didn't start out that way. Because I came from a documentary photo background, I originally tried to avoid using it whenever I could. To me, the process would be a lot more fun if I could do it in real life. So by utilizing the help of friends, some knowledge of lighting and composition, and a lot of scotch tape, we were able to pull off this in one shot. I sat still for about an hour while my friend Billy the Kim Strong Ill taped the cranes to my face. Eventually the sweat started to build up and we actually had to rush to take the picture before they fell.
There's a famous boston photographer named "Abe Morell" who is known for his mastery of the camera obscura technique. Abe is also one of my photography heroes, and a lot of my work around this time was heavily influenced by him. This technique is the principle that all cameras are based upon. In nature, when small bits of light enters a dark chamber, the image of what's outside that hole will be projected on the inside walls of the chamber, only upside-down. This effect was used during the renaissance by painters to trace outlines of subjects to ensure correct perspective. Here I photographed them with my good friend, fellow artist and blogger Aziz "Oz" Lalani when he came to visit me back in 2010. Oz and I went to undergrad together, and has a lot more experience with building set than I do. This was probably the most efficient camera obscura I have ever done thanks to his help.
When the winter finally came, I had to rushing to finish the some 400 cranes debt I had left. While the first few snowfalls were more icy than fluffy, this was one of my first attempts at photographing the cranes actually in the snow. The light was a bit harsher than I thought it would be, and so I knew I would have to wait for an overcast day, with fresh snow to carry out my plan the way I wanted to.
From this shoot I was able to get a pretty good idea of how I would want to frame my project. I knew that I wanted to integrate my cranes with the snow, like an obvious camouflage. Now all I had to do was wait patiently... 
When the day finally came, it was the last big snow storm of the season in February, 2011. If I had missed the shoot that morning, I probably would have had to wait another year. 
This picture is actually three pictures merged together, something I had initially photographed with this specific intention, but then forgot about. I found these pictures recently as I was trying to pull 20 images together in a series so I could apply for some photo competition. As I was looking through my images I thought to myself "wait a sec, there should be a picture here that I forgot to do." Now for the first time, this images has been released to the public. 
This was it. This was the moment of truth. You can't exactly burn 1000 paper cranes twice, no, that would require 2000 cranes, so this was going to be a one shot deal. Everything I had worked for added up to this one moment - and then the goddamn paper would not light. Even as I dosed the cranes in lighter fluid, it was simply too wet and too cold for them to burn. Instead, they simmered quitely. 
Fin.
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