An Abundant Amount of A
A week spent inside the Anthony Amadeo archive, editing Ahmad, Adam, Andres, Andreas, Ali, Aja, Adrian—and an almost absurd number of additional A’s.
After writing about the subtle differences between two photographs taken only a few frames apart, I kept editing.
And editing.
And editing.
The deeper I went into my old shoots, the more I began to realize the sheer number of people I have photographed. Faces, bodies, gestures, personalities, passing expressions, accidental movements and entire little worlds have accumulated inside my archive. Some shoots I remember perfectly. Others return to me one frame at a time.
In an attempt to give this enormous archive some kind of order, I decided to begin with something simple: the alphabet.
More specifically, the letter A.
Surely, I thought, I could spend a few days going through the models whose names begin with A, finish the group and then continue on to B.
That was adorable.
One full week later, I was still inside the A’s.
Ahmad. Adam S. Andres. Andreas. Ali. Aja. Adrian J. Adam R. Adam M. Arthur. Abneudy. Aaron M. Aidan. Amaury. Antonio C. Aaron B. Andrew. Airon. Ahseem. Adrian A. Ace. Austin. Antonio P. And somehow, Aaron M. again.
An abundant amount of A names.
Each name opened another folder, another shoot and another version of myself as a photographer. Different apartments. Different cities. Different windows. Different qualities of light. Different ideas of beauty that I was exploring at the time.
Some portraits immediately told me what they needed. Others were more ambiguous. A slight adjustment to the grey scale could make someone appear distant or inviting. A darker crop could turn an ordinary glance into something almost cinematic. An image I had ignored years ago could suddenly feel more alive than the one I originally selected.
The archive was not asking me to simply clean it up. It was asking me to reconsider it.
A Week Consumed by A
After several days, the letter began following me outside of the computer.
Anthony Amadeo.
amadeo amadeo.
The abundance of the archive.
The apples I was eating while editing.
I started noticing A’s everywhere, as though the letter had appointed itself the creative director of my week. It appeared in names, signs, sentences and thoughts. Every activity seemed to arrive already alliterated.
I began assembling a list of my favorite A words—the ones that feel connected to the way I make photographs and art:
Abundant. Abstract. Accord. Aesthetic. Ambiguous. Audacious. Authentic. Accentuated.
They began to sound less like vocabulary words and more like instructions.
Be abundant with ideas.
Allow an image to remain ambiguous.
Make something audacious.
Accentuate what makes a person impossible to overlook.
Aim for authenticity, even when the photograph itself is a complete invention.
Eventually, I tried to create an A-based tongue twister. My answer to “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers” became something like:
amadeo amadeo asked an audacious assembly of A-named artists about angles, attitude and accidental allure.
It does not become easier to say with practice.
An Assembly of Individuals
What became most apparent while moving through these portraits was that the alphabet might organize the folders, but it cannot organize the people.
The A’s have very little in common beyond the first letter of their names and the fact that, at some point, they stood in front of my camera.
One person might offer a quiet, almost imperceptible shift in expression. Another might arrive with enough energy to alter the entire direction of the shoot. Some faces invite closeness. Others become more interesting when they remain slightly inaccessible. Some people understand a strange direction immediately. Others need to arrive at it through conversation, movement, laughter or accident.
That exchange is always part of the photograph.
The finished portrait may look still, but making it rarely is. There is talking, waiting, adjusting, reconsidering and occasionally abandoning the original idea altogether. There are the conscious directions I give and the subconscious ones the model somehow understands before I have properly explained them.
Editing all these A’s together made the archive feel less like a storage system and more like an enormous ongoing conversation.
Each portrait answers something the previous portrait asked.
Advantageous Ab-Libbing
I wanted this week to feel productive. I wanted to complete the A’s, move on to the B’s and watch the archive fall obediently into place.
Instead, the letter A expanded until it consumed the entire week.
And perhaps that was the actual assignment.
I am trying to anticipate what might come from getting all this work done: rediscovered photographs, new articles, new opportunities, a more complete understanding of what I have made and perhaps even a clearer idea of what I want to make next.
At the same time, I am learning to become more accepting of the ad-libbing of activity that comes my way.
A day begins with a plan. Then an image catches my attention. That image leads to another folder. The folder recalls a person, a place or an unfinished idea. Suddenly the intended task has transformed into something else entirely.
It can feel like distraction, but sometimes it is discovery.
This was an awesome and unexpectedly advantageous week—an alphabetical excavation through years of faces, gestures and fleeting moments. I still have not finished editing every A, but I have accepted that abundance rarely arrives neatly organized.
For now, A is for archive.
A is for attention.
A is for all the people who have allowed me to photograph them.
And somewhere inside the hard drive, the letter B is already becoming impatient.