Meet Mark Lipczynski, a local lensman who’s on a mission to shoot 101 portraits in as many days. Called Photography 101, each shot is documented on his blog, including a brief description of how he met the subject, chose the set-up and achieved each particular look.

Take the beautifully-bearded subject at right. Named Kris Olmon, he’s a graphic designer for the edgy Switch studio in Tempe. However, Lipczynski, who shot for the Arizona Republic before budget cutbacks sent him off into his own orbit, re-imagined his friend as newspaper boy, or newsie, who’s now grown and facing an uncertain future, “in a fading industry, left behind by more flashy and modern advances in technology.”

Which also explains Lipczynski’s motivation for launching the project in the first place. “Work was slow, and I wanted to stay motivated, inspired,” Lipczynski says. Although he’s since scratched his original goal of a portrait a day (“I started to feel like I was just shooting for the sake of keeping my word”), he’s still plugging away, adding new images and even passing on technical details of how each shot was achieved. “The project is really about documenting this digital revolution we are all going through. It’s the Industrial Revolution of our times.”

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